I’ve been interested for a long time in literature and cognition, within a broad chronological period encompassing Old English literature and contemporary speculative and hypertext fiction. I’ve worked on ideas related to the history of mathematics, especially calculus and decision theory; circulating credit as a theological metaphor in the seventeenth century; islands, cities, and distorted topographies; riddles, paradoxes, and the mapping of one kind of ignorance onto another; fiction and technology; and methods of modelling the inconceivable. All these topics relate to the idea that knowledge acquisition is often a non-cumulative, nonlinear, alogical process, in which the mind must endorse certain imprecisions in order to conceive of otherwise inaccessible truth.

Education

  • PhD English, Princeton University, 2019
  • MA Renaissance Literature, University of York, 2011
  • MA (Hons) English, University of St Andrews, 2009

Publications