Academic work

My academic work examines the manifestations of utopia, the commons, and precarity in contemporary culture, with a particular interest in post-2008 poetry, novels, and speculative fiction, and cultural production within contemporary global activist movements.

In 2020 I finished writing my PhD dissertation at Birkbeck, University of London. My first book, Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature, is coming out in 2023.

Photograph of me presenting my paper 'The Utopian Body in Contemporary Literatures of Crisis' at BACLS 2018, Loughborough University, UK Photograph by Carly Marie Robinson (@carlymarierobbbo)

Beyond Gender Research Collective

I am a co-founder of the non-hierarchical research collective Beyond Gender, an ongoing experiment in collaborative writing, close reading, and theorising about the possibilities of science fiction.

Utopian Acts 2018

In 2018, along with Katie Stone, I organised Utopian Acts 2018, a one-day festival and conference exploring the relationship between activism, art, and academia. The conference programme, photos, and blog posts are available on the Utopian Acts website.

Photograph of the band Dream Nails running a zine-making workshop at Utopian Acts 2018 Photograph by Daniel Jackery

Books

Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature: A Commons Poetics, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
Imagining the End of Capitalism: Utopia and the Commons in Contemporary Literature, PhD dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London (2020).

Essays and chapters

With Beyond Gender Research Collective. Drowning in the Cloud: Water, the Digital and the Queer Potential of Feminist Science Fiction, in Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction, ed. Sherryl Vint and Sümeyra Buran (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
With Beyond Gender Research Collective. A Future Collectively Salvaged from the Rubble, The Architectural Review, ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’: 125th Birthday Issue (2021).
With Elena Govor. ‘If you thirst for freedom, seize it!’: The songs of the Belarusian uprising, Transitions, 2021.
‘Life! Life!’: The Precarious Utopianism of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Utopian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2021).
‘Come here, it sang, listen’: Juliana Spahr’s commons poetics in That Winter the Wolf Came, Textual Practice, Vol. 35, No. 7 (2021).
Responding to the Chance of Space in Marshland, Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2016).
Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature, Alluvium, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2015).

Podcasts and recordings

‘A Constellation of Commons’ and discussion with Tamara de Groot and Robin van den Akker on utopia and the commons, for Techne Congress: Back to the Future, July 2020, Loughborough University London.

Unpublished work

Riot Noises: Verbatim Theatre Representations of the 2011 UK Riots and the Limits of Comprehension, MA dissertation, King’s College, London (2016).
(Un)mapping the Edgelands: Towards a new genre in contemporary British literature, Honours dissertation, Australian National University (2014).

Conference papers

With Beyond Gender Research Collective. “Navigating Beyond Gender: The City in Feminist Science Fiction.” (Un)fair Cities: Equity, Ideology and Utopia in Urban Texts, December 2019, University of Limerick.
“Never a Common Common Enough: Ongoing Futures in the Poetry of Juliana Spahr.” Poetics in Commons, May 2019, University of Sheffield.
“‘Life! Life! Life!’: The Precarious Utopianism of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140.” Disruption, Displacement, and Disorder: 43rd Society for Utopian Studies Conference, November 2018, University of California Berkeley.
“The Utopian Body in Contemporary Literatures of Crisis.” British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies - What Happens Now, July 2018, Loughborough University.
“‘It’s All Good, It’s All Fucked’: The Anti-Capitalist Commons in Contemporary Poetry.” Movements: Protest, Politics and Activism in the Twenty-First Century, July 2018, Nottingham Contemporary.
“Lines of Flight: The Utopian Escape in Contemporary Speculative Literature.” Utopia, Now!, August 2017, Chelsea College of Arts, London. (Audio)
“Troubled Solidarity, Precarious Utopias.” Solidarity and Utopia: 18th Utopian Studies Society Conference, July 2017, Gdańsk, Poland.
“The Snow and the Zone: Creating communitas on the thresholds of sf cinema.” CRSF 2017, June 2017, University of Liverpool.
“Occupy the Threshold: Locating occupation protests in liminal space.” Crossing Borders: Negotiation, Provocation, and Transgression, May 2017, Birkbeck, University of London.
“A Poetics of Emptiness: Naming places at the urban margin.” 2015 ELLAK International Conference: Spaces/Spatialities: Practices, Encounters and Articulations, December 2015, Busan, South Korea.