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I recently completed my PhD studies at the University of Manchester, with a thesis titled 'Metropolitan Dissent in Thomas Hardy's Fiction: Class, Gender, Empire'. My PhD research departs from a critical tradition in Hardy studies that has so far tended to interpret empire in the fiction in terms of the colonisation of Wessex. Instead, it focuses on the entanglement of Wessex with overseas imperial spaces, arguing for multiple, and, more importantly, deeply uneven forms of contact with the empire. My other areas of interest include cultural materialism, world-systems theory, theories of nationalism, 'thing' theory, labour history and imperial history. I am currently a sessional lecturer and tutor at the University of Salford, with previous teaching experience at the University of Manchester. I have two published articles with the Thomas Hardy Journal (2009 & 2014), a co-authored piece, 'Empire', in the edited volume Thomas Hardy in Context (CUP, 2013), and three book reviews in the Thomas Hardy Journal (2013) and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2014 & 2015). In 2013-2015, I was a steering committee member of the Manchester Postcolonial Reading Group, which included themed reading sessions, in addition to cross-disciplinary ateliers with leading academics to discuss their work-in-progress. In January 2016, I co-organised the major public-facing Northern Postcolonial Network workshop and twinned symposium on the topics of 'Asylum, Refuge, Migration', jointly hosted by the universities of Salford and Manchester.