My research questions the self-evident through close reading. It follows that I am especially interested in analysing discourses that seem straightforward, simplistic, and unquestionable. This has led me to engage extensively with Children's Literature, as it is often taken to grant access to immediate truths. Utilizing only an accurate reading of narration, my aim is to defamiliarize these texts, and from this question wider societal appeals to structure, sexuality, objecthood, agency, and identity. In developing a text-based, non-essentialist approach to literature, I have become interested in critiquing a wide variety of discourses that are claimed in some way to be resistant to reading, including: 'the material turn'; 'the turn to affect'; contemporary film theory; evolutionary psychology; discourses of student-centred education; the literature of childhood in general; new-managerialism in Higher Education. Recently, however, I have begun to focus on ideas of the a-symbolic in the work of theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek. I also have a long standing interest in both 'the uncanny' and paranoia in literature.

I have published numerous articles and book chapters on subjects as diverse as children's literature, art theory, Dickens, queer theory, education theory, and the problematic claims of evolutionary psychology. I have also published three monographs. The first, from 2009, is a critique of student-centred education. I followed this in 2014 with a work concerned with overlooked children in nineteenth century English literature, and the difficulties that arise from reading something in a text that has not previously been noticed. The book includes extended engagements with work by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, and Christina Rossetti. My most recent monograph offers an original engagement with Higher Education discourse, one that takes its cue from approaches more usually associated with literary studies. It was reviewed by Prof. Ian Parker as an 'astonishing and necessary book [...] an argument for and exemplar of good critical textual practice', and by Dr. Jan de Vos as 'mandatory reading for scholars and their managers'.

I am currently working on two further books. The first, provisionally entitled 'Reading on the Shelf' is an extended critique of appeals to the a-symbolic in 'return to Lacan' theory. Through readings of Žižek on Ayn Rand; the figure of the child in recent contributions to 'The Purloined Poe' debate; the rejection of Screen theory in contemporary Film Studies; critical controversies relating to the Australian Uncanny; and Joan Copjec's account of anxiety and genre, I aim to work through what might be at stake in the shelving of reading within contemporary psychoanalytic theory. The second book, provisionally entitled 'Ayn Rand From the Left', is part of a wider project to question contemporary right-wing and libertarian narratives. I am organising a conference related to this work, entitled 'Ayn Rand From the Left', to be held at The University of Reading in Autumn 2018.

I publish and perform poetry under the name 'Obby Robinson'.

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