I am Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where I specialize in Narrative Theory and Graduate Writing. I am also the Director of Graduate Writing Support in the Faculty of Arts & Science. In the latter role, I provide writing instruction and support for graduate students through and beyond their programs.

Focusing on writing, my work with graduate students seeks to address a wide range of related challenges that are well known to make graduate education more difficult, from social and professional isolation to degree completion.

Click on the links here for more on my Writing Support activities and Upcoming Events in writing support. If you are a student, postdoc, faculty or staff at the University of Toronto, you can enroll in the A&S Graduate Professional Development and Student Success Quercus page for more details and to get notifications about my writing-support offerings.

My teaching focuses primarily on scholarly writing. Working with graduate students across Arts & Science, I run clinics, peer-review sessions and roundtables on writing strategies and skills. I also lead writing groups and camps designed to help graduate students begin, continue and finish their dissertations, articles, proposals and other documents. In the Department of English, I teach narrative theory and twentieth- and twenty-first century literature.

My primary areas of interest in writing studies concern the role of sociality in academic writing, as well as the art of giving effective feedback on graduate-student writing, particularly on dissertation/thesis writing. My writing-studies research overlaps to a significant extent with my literary research innarratology, Literature & Science Studies, and the intersections between narrative theory, linguistics and science communication.

In literary studies, I focus primarily on modern and contemporary British and Irish fiction, though I have also published on American and Canadian literature and on Shakespeare. My main literary interests are the narrative dynamics of plotless fiction, the representation of unnarratable events or processes, and the relationships between genre and experimentation.

See my CV for more on my scholarship, teaching and other writings. My News page will feature announcements about my research.

I am an avid birder and pollinator-gardener. You can see photos of my garden on my Blog, among other sundry things, and my birding activities are logged on Cornell University’s incredible citizen-science site eBird. I am also an amateur musician, playing guitar, piano and other instruments. After dabbling in poetry and fiction, I have devoted almost all my creative-writing energies to the peculiar challenges of songwriting, especially in the unforgiving genre of country.