My academic work has been shaped by a sustained interest in how aesthetic forms move across media, with particular attention to the relation between voice, sound, and textual expression. My doctoral research examined the act and theme of passing-for-white in U.S. literature and film, analysing the intersections of race, sex, and gender in American cultural production. This early work established an interest in performance, mediation, and embodiment that has continued to inform my research.

My first book, Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), develops this interest through an account of melodrama as an intermedial form. Drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion: scène lyrique—often described as an ur-melodrama—the book traces a structure in which musical phrasing alternates with spoken narration. It argues that this alternation between speech and music establishes a durable formal logic that persists across media, from eighteenth-century performance to contemporary screen culture. Through case studies including Mad Men, Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce, and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the book shows how melodrama adapts as it moves between literary, theatrical, and audiovisual forms.

This intermedial approach has since extended into a series of publications that bring close reading into dialogue with close listening. Across work on contemporary literature and art—including studies of music and speech in literary texts, and analyses of forms such as the podcast (for example S-Town)—I examine how meaning emerges through the interplay of vocal, sonic, visual and textual elements. This body of work develops a method attentive not only to what texts say, but to how they sound, and to the conditions under which they are heard.

My second book, The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming 2026), builds on this intermedial framework to examine how aesthetic judgment operates within computer-networked environments. Focusing on forms ranging from music video and podcast to personal essay, the book argues that taste functions as a distributed and adaptive mode of evaluation that circulates through networked media. It traces how distinctions conventionally described as highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow persist and mutate across these forms, and how they are shaped by new modes of participation, circulation, and reception.

My current research extends these concerns into an Australian context through two interconnected projects.

The first, The Sound of Literature: A Century of Listening to Australian Writing (1923–2023), investigates how audio technologies—from radio to audiobooks and podcasts—have shaped Australian literary culture. Building on my earlier work on melodrama and intermedial form, the project develops methods of “close listening” to analyse how literary works are produced, circulated, and received as sound, and how listening practices reshape interpretation and aesthetic experience.

The second is a biography of the major Australian writer Ruth Park. Park’s career offers a distinctive case study in intermedial literary production: across her lifetime she wrote novels, short stories, autobiography, children’s literature, journalism, stage and radio drama, television scripts, and other forms, including thousands of radio broadcasts. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted as the 2023 Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, this project traces Park’s sustained commitment to writing as a vocation and examines how her work moves across print and sound media. In 2026, the project was Highly Commended for the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.

Contemporary literature and new media; intermediality; sound and literature; "close listening"; melodrama; taste-making and computer networking; US literature, Australian Literature, Ruth Park.