Biography

I studied English literature at McGill University, graduated in 2011, and spent last year teaching English in the south of Spain. Following earlier flings with journalism and arts administration, my ambition turned to academia—and to a fascination with evocations of, and meditations on, the past in twentieth-century literature. At Cambridge I will complete an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature and write a dissertation on the intersection of fiction and history in the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald and W. G. Sebald. The imagined past takes one back to a basic impulse of fiction and forward to the fate of the novel in contemporary writing: with the support of the Trust, I aim for a not dissimilar combination of teaching and writing, the study and the practice of the ways in which people deal with unquiet histories.