My critical writing focuses on Surrealism, experimental poetics, and the ways in which creative practice itself can be a mode of research, reflection, and transformation.

I have written and presented several papers at Surrealisms, the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, focusing on:

• the value of understanding practice within the context of academic study

• how surrealist women writers engaged with and reshaped the movement’s enquiries
• the widening of Surrealism’s repertoire through feminist and ecopoetic lenses
• the concept of mimicry as a subversive, destabilising practice

Beyond this, I have also written on Antonin Artaud’s cinepoetry of the occult, examining the relationship between cinema, magic and the materiality of the lens. I am also currently engaged in a collaborative translation project, bringing Gherasim Luca’s early Romanian poetry into publication form.

Lately my research has moved more broadly into the intersections between surrealism and therapeutic practice. This has resulted in a book proposal, Torpedo the Mind: Surrealism, Therapy and Altered States, which explores the therapeutic energies and altered states opened by surrealist methods in both historical and contemporary practice.

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Selected Essays & Papers

• Impersonation from the Triple Margin: a critical and creative exploration of the fiction of surrealist outsiders and dissidents – Carrington, Colquhoun, Cahun; Desnos and Crevel (Surrealisms, Exeter 2019) Download Abstract (PDF)
• Surrealist prose and the ‘chaosmos of the personal’: syncretism, alchemy and informational excess as strategies in a critical-creative exploration of the surrealist fictions of Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Claude Cahun (Surrealisms, online 2020) Download Abstract (PDF)
• Diving to The Cinema Beneath the Lake: a novel as immersive, synthetic-magical exploration of the surrealist prose of Claude Cahun, Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington (Surrealisms, online 2021) Download Abstract (PDF)
• Surrealism and the ‘dreamt autobiography’: oneiric materiality in the prose of Claude Cahun and Ithell Colquhoun (Surrealisms, online 2022) Download Abstract (PDF)
• The Passive Vampire and The Inventor of Love: Ghérasim Luca and the Totalitarian Force of Non-Oedipal Desire (Surrealisms, Centenary Conference, Paris 2024) Download Abstract (PDF)
• Outsider Prose: Ithell Colquhoun and the Surrealist Novel as immersive Practice (Surrealisms, Centenary Conference, Paris 2024) Download Abstract (PDF)
• ‘Anatomies in Action’: Artaud’s written drawings as ‘machines of instant utility’ (Chapter pitch for Bloomsbury) Download Abstract (PDF)
• ‘The Phantom of Materiality’: Artaud’s Cinepoetry of the Occult (Read here)
• ‘The Last Shirt of the Soul’: the Inner Resorts of Gherasim Luca (Preface to ‘The Last Shirt of the Soul’: Early Poetry and Prose of Gherasim Luca’)
• A Nomad in the Land of the Father: Ec(h)opoiesis in Lisa Samuels’ Tender Girl and Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror (Looking for Publication) Download Abstract (PDF)
• The Everyday Marvellous: Collaborative Surrealist Methods for Creative Therapy (Looking for Publication) Download Abstract (PDF)