I’m currently available for a non-fiction commissions – here’s a list of some of my favourite subjects, but if you’ve got an idea you’d like to discuss then please get in touch regardless.
Queerness & gender
As a queer woman with a deeply complex relationship to femininity, I’m fascinated by gender and the relationships between gender and sexuality, gender and disability, and gender and selfhood. I’ve written extensively about my own queer experience, the work of queer artists and authors, and new ways of thinking and theorising about queerness, whether that’s in BBC’s Torchwood or the trope of the haunted house in the contemporary lesbian imagination.
My interest in these subjects is both academic and deeply subjective, and I’m particularly interested in hybrid, creative, and practice-as-research ways of exploring these themes. Most recently, I attended the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship’s 2022 Symposium, Queering Desire: Lesbians, Gender and Subjectivity, to further my work in this area.
Sad, mad women
I affectionately nickname this interest “sad white girls”, as I’m particularly interested in examining the cultural myth of middle-class white femininity and its relation to the trope of the beautiful dead girl / manic pixie dream girl. I wrote about sad white girls in suburbia for Another Gaze, in my essay on Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides – I think suburbia is a particularly rich background for these kinds of stories, about stifled or problematic femininity which both does and doesn’t belong. I’m not only interested in white and / or rich girls, though, and would love to take my knowledge in different directions going forward.
Pop music
Somewhat relatedly, I’ve written a lot about Taylor Swift – you can find links to individual pieces on my music writing page. I presented at the inaugural Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music and Media, an interdisciplinary symposium on Swift’s music and career, and am currently working on a chapter for the edited collection Taylor Swift: The Songs, The Star, The Fans, which is under contract with Routledge for publication in 2023.
I find Swift fascinating from many perspectives: her lyrics, her micro-managing of her own image, her branding. She’s the artist I’m most invested in, and I expect to keep exploring her work in both academic and more casual formats (most recently I’ve been presenting some of my analysis on TikTok) for the foreseeable future. I’m also interested in executing similar deep dives into other artists: in the past I’ve written about Lorde and Lana Del Rey, as well as other artists like boygenius and The Mountain Goats – again, you can find my published writing on the music writing page on this site.
I’m also interested in pop music as a changing genre, celebrity and public performance, and the machinery of the entertainment industry. Much of my work on Taylor Swift particularly deals with these subjects, and I’d love to keep exploring them in new work.
Selfhood and relationality
I’m interested in the identities we develop / construct / get stuck with; the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves, and to others; and the role other people play in our understanding of ourselves. I keep coming back to this idea whether I’m thinking about Taylor Swift, modern art, or scifi movies about the encroaching void.
Fashion
I’ve always loved fashion and costuming, and am looking to write more on these subjects – I reviewed the Savage Beauty exhibition at the V&A for a student mag a long time ago, and more recently talked a lot about the role fashion and beauty play in Strickland’s In Fabric in this newsletter, but I’d really love to write a lot more on these subjects! Please commission me!
Embedded Criticism
I’m particularly interested in collaborative approaches to art, and in producing responses which are creative in and of themselves. Although I have many years’ experience as a theatre critic, I’m now looking for opportunities to work more closely with companies to really get under the skin of a production and write pieces which are perhaps more thoughtful and in-depth than a traditional review. In 2019, I worked with devised theatre company The Paper Birds to create two responses to their show Ask Me Anything; with Izzy Inkpen on their Totally Thames show Run Softly; and with the creators of The Niceties at the Finborough Theatre to produce a dialogic response to the show, and to host a talkback.
Although embedded criticism is primarily a practice in the theatre industry, I’d be really interested in doing a similar type of work in other contexts: for example, working with artists or musicians to respond to their work in a long-form way. I’m also interested in interdisciplinary collaboration, and the possibilities opened up by the tension between different forms or genres.
Also: translation; grief; Caroline Calloway; the fragment; What Makes Art Good?; mental illness more broadly; neurodiversity; Milton; friendship; the relentlessly horrifying onward march of Time; T. S. Eliot; and more.