West Firle, Sussex, September 2020
I’m an Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK. My interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection between performativity, migration, voice and the politics of recognition. My second academic book is under contract with Amsterdam University Press within their Media, Culture and Communication in Migrant Societies series.
I’m currently researching solidarity in Europe in light of the ongoing situation in Ukraine funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant. My book Refugee Voices: Performativity and the Struggle for Recognition was published by Routledge in March 2024. I’ve also been a Visiting Fellow at the Deutsche Zentrum für Integrations und Migrationsforschung (DeZIM) in Berlin and Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, and am working on AHRC-funded Impact work in the UK with partners including the Imperial War Museum and Migration Museum. I’ve been published in peer-reviewed journals including Media War and Conflict, Journalism Studies, the International Communication Gazette and Pyschoanalysis, Culture and Society, and have presented at all of the major international communication conferences in the field. I have experience of developing courses and running degree programmes.
Alongside academic work, I have extensive experience of writing for a public audience, having reported from over 19 countries, and written for at least 30 titles over two decades, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Times, Harvard Nieman Lab, openDemocracy, frieze, Art Review, Paris Review Daily, Prospect, Smithsonian, and the Guardian. I’ve also worked as an investigative researcher for Channel 4 (UK), as a communications consultant and researcher for INGOs including the World Wildlife Fund and Amnesty International, and as a copywriter for organisations including King’s College London, the British Council, and the Berlin nightclub Tresor.
Before working for Sussex, former staff journalism roles included arts correspondent and features writer at the Independent newspaper in London, and acting arts and media correspondent of the Observer newspaper (UK), for which I was nominated for a British Press Award. Prior to that I was an award-winning journalist for trade magazines. My first degree was in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where I edited the university’s student newspaper.
I have a PhD from the Dept of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics where I was supervised by Prof Myria Georgiou and Prof Shani Orgad. During my doctorate, and for several years afterwards, I undertook psychoanalysis multiple times a week via the Institute of Psychoanalysis’s low fee scheme, and retain this interest and influence in my work. I use ethnography, visual and critical discourse analysis.
Writing
Published on platforms including the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer (UK), Prospect, frieze, Paris Review Daily, Smithsonian, New Statesman, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, the Art Newspaper, Calvert Journal, Time Out London, the Village Voice, the Evening Standard, Esquire, Museums Journal, the White Review, Guernica, LA Review of Books, Modern Painters, Dazed and Confused, BOMB, the Millions, Wonderland, Icon and Night and Day (Vintage Books); also worked as an assistant producer for Channel 4 Dispatches.
Consultancy/strategy
Non-profits, arts and media organisations including Amnesty International, WWF, King’s College London, RADA, Tresor Berlin, Southbank Centre, Hearst Corporation