I am an AHRC funded PhD student, working in the subject area of English Language in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.

I do research in the field of cognitive narratology, a branch of ‘postclassical’ narrative theory which seeks to study the mind-relevant aspects of storytelling. Specifically, the focus is on the dual nature of narrative, broadly conceived: firstly, narrative as object of interpretation; secondly, narrative as a means of making sense of experience.

I am interested in the ‘naturalizing’ strategies readers employ when reading autobiographical accounts of chronic illness, particular when those accounts appear incoherent, fragmented, or broken.

Adopting the twin perspective of narrative above, my PhD asks two questions: (1) how do readers make sense of narrative incoherence; (2) how do these fragmented narratives make sense of experience? Finally, what can this approach contribute to debates surrounding the philosophical and psychological notion of ‘narrative identity’?

In this respect, my work is influenced as much by ‘classical’ structuralist models of narrative as by contemporary linguistics, psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science. With a foundational commitment to the interdisciplinary study of storytelling, cognitive narratology is an open, exciting, dynamic field of enquiry. Honest.