At Kent, I am affiliated with the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing, the Centre for Colonial and

Postcolonial Studies and the Centre for American Studies. I am the Director of the MA in Medical
Humanities and member of the Medical Humanities Research Cluster. I serve as Internationalisation
Officer in the School of English and as Chair of the Research Ethics Committee in the Faculty of
Humanities.

My research interests lie in multi-ethnic American literature, Black studies, illness narratives, disability
studies and medical humanities.

My first book Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s
Fiction (Rodopi, 2011) considers the continuing relevance of the Bildungsromanin an ethnic
American and postcolonial context. It includes chapters on Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros,
Maxine Hong Kingston and Audre Lorde. I have recently completed a new monograph titled Illness
as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) that explores the
aesthetic, ethical and cultural importance of contemporary representations of illness across different
arts and media. Through case studies on photography, artists’ books, performance art, film, theatre,
animation and o