I am a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, and the author of Sigmund Freud (Routledge Press, 2000; second edition, 2009) and Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). I am the co-editor with Leah Price of Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Ashgate Press, 2005); with Nicola Bown and Carolyn Burdett of The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge University Press 2004), and with Sian White of a special issue of Textual Practice on Elizabeth Bowen (2013). I have written on a wide variety of thinkers and writers including Sandor Ferenczi, Bob Dylan, George Eliot, Elvis Costello, Henry James, Billy Bragg, Morrissey, and Daniel Clowes. My relationship with psychoanalytic theory and history is eclectic; In 2014 I gave a talk at a psychoanalytic salon in Hampstead on our cultural transference on to Bob Dylan’s meanness; I also remain fascinated by Freud’s wilder texts from Totem and Taboo to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I am currently working on a book manuscript on modern adolescence and time travel, called Keep your Back to the Future; Adolescent Time Travel across the 20th Century, which includes a chapter on Freud and G. Stanley Hall.

Selected publications with a psychoanalytic connection:

“Bringing Nanda Forward, or Acting your Age in The Awkward Age” forthcoming in Critical Quarterly 57: 4 (December 2015)

“Dylan’s Sneer”, Isis (Issue Number 178, 2015) 38-41. (forthcoming in the Journal of the British Psychoanalytic Society)

“Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the ‘Case’ of Adolescence,” A Companion to Literary Criticism and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014): 167-190.

“Dead Boys and Adolescent Girls: Unjoining the Bildungsroman in Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding and Toni Morrison’s Sula,” English Studies in Canada, special issue “Childhood and Its Discontents,” ed. Natasha Hurley 38:3-4 (September/December 2012): 105-128.

“Freud’s stepchild: Adolescent Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis,” History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past. Eds. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 173-192.