My academic CV is nothing if not eclectic, thanks in part to an insatiable curiosity about the entire world, and in part to a career that has been severely disrupted by major illness requiring four rounds of surgery.  However, I'm one of the lucky ones - someone who can be fully cured.

 

I'm now back as a full-time academic at the University of Oxford, where I'm delighted to be starting an independent fellowship as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Nature, Attention and Biodiversity. 

​

I trained in English, and received a doctorate in cultural history from UCL. I also hold a degree in biology from the Open University, and I worked for over a decade as a political ecologist in a social sciences department. As you might expect, my work is strongly interdisciplinary!

 

My independent fellowship explores the entanglement of the natural and human worlds. I am investigating:

​

• the making of the 'new suburbia': the way that modern British housing estates incarnate certain visions and valuations of nature

• the way that suburban green spaces change over time, in response to perceived threats to our cognition (and especially our capacity for attention) from the urban realm

• the construction of biodiversity as a commodity, the way that this is changing green space, with implications for democracy and social justice

​

In terms of theoretical approach, I am interested in:

​

• Disavowal, meaning the multiple ways in which we protect certain kinds of belief or knowledge that we know to be problematic from attention.

• Cynicism, both in the ancient sense of a truth-telling discourse that challenges forms of disavowal, and the modern sense of a world-weary attitude that disables radical challenges to the status quo.

 

I'm also Co-Investigator on a £1m ESRC-funded bid on planning and biodiversity, starting in February 2025.  (I will post more information about this soon, but for now please contact me on the email address below if you are interested in hearing about this straight away). 

​

I am book reviews editor for the journal Gender, Place, and Culture.