My research is situated between French Studies and the Medical and Health Humanities. I explore how contemporary French philosophy and cultural production are currently dialoguing with biomedical science. My research demonstrates how engagements with science and medicine across philosophy, literature and visual art can help us respond to diverse problems facing healthcare and medicine around the globe and transform the ways we think about therapy and care. I am primarily interested in how interdisciplinary research across the Medical and Health Humanities can help us to re-imagine and transform healthcare architectures, spaces and environments, particularly in ways that render these environments more inclusive to patients from marginalized communities. I am Programme Lead for the MA in Global Medical and Health Humanities.

My current project, Transforming the Hospital with Contemporary French Philosophy, argues that contemporary French philosophers are today engaging with biomedical science and clinical architectures in ways which can propose new kinds of healthcare spaces and hospital environments. Bringing together thinkers such as Catherine Malabou, Paul B. Preciado, Jean-Luc Nancy and Isabelle Stengers, I argue that there has been a shift in the relationship between French philosophy and the hospital: whereas Michel Foucault’s influential critique Birth of the Clinic (1963) once characterised a philosophical distrust of the hospital, my new project seeks to analyse how contemporary French philosophers are engaging positively and dynamically with medical science in order to propose new clinical environments for empowering and emancipatory healthcare. I have published work from this project in recent articles: ‘The Plastic Clinic: Catherine Malabou’s Architectural Therapeutics’ (Essays in French Literature & Culture, 2021); ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Hospital: Imagining Clinical Environments of Strangeness and Multiplicity’ (Nottingham French Studies, 2023); ‘Paul B. Preciado’s Queer Hospital: Healthcare Architectures for Pleasure, Transformation and Subversion’ (The Senses & Society, 2024); ‘Gentle Biologies: Reconceptualizing Bodily Metamorphosis and Healthcare between Catherine Malabou and Anne Dufourmantelle’ (Paragraph, 2024); and ‘Malabou, Medicine and Film: Screening Brain Injury, Organ Transplantation and Plasticity in Katell Quillévéré’s Heal The Living’ (Film-Philosophy, 2024).

I am particularly interested in how philosophy can propose empowering healthcare environments for LGBTQIA+ patients, and am founder and leader of the Queer Medical Humanities Network at Lancaster University and co-author alongside Chase Ledin of ‘Queer Medical Humanities’ (The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2024). I am also co-editor alongside Alice Pember of the Special Issue of Modern and Contemporary France on ‘Robin Campilo’s 120 Battements par minute (2017): Screening AIDS, Activism and Queer Identity in Contemporary France’(2022). Bringing my work on queer and LGBTQIA+ healthcare into practical application in relation to my research on the hospital, I am currently Co-I on the funded interdisciplinary project ‘The Queer Lives of the Hospital: An Archive of LGBTQIA+ Experiences of Healthcare Environments’ (2025).

My research has also explored the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, who writes at the intersections of philosophy and the biomedical sciences, in particular neuroscience. Malabou’s central concept of ‘plasticity’ describes how organic lifeforms change and transform throughout life, as can be seen for instance in the neuroplasticity of the human brain which adapts and re-models itself constantly. My work brings Malabou’s interdisciplinary philosophy of biological mutability and plasticity into contact with depictions of bodily transformation and metamorphosis in contemporary French literature and film. My publications on Malabou, literature and film include: ‘Cruising the Queer Forest with Alain Guiraudie: Woods, Plastics, Plasticities’ (chapter in Beasts of the Forest, John Libbey, 2019); ‘Forms of Freedoms: Marie Darrieussecq, Catherine Malabou, and the Plasticity of Science’ (Dalhousie French Studies, 2020); ‘Queer, Plastic Residues: Biological Mutability and Queer Resistance in Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM (2017) and the Work of Catherine Malabou’ (Modern and Contemporary France, 2022); and ‘Plasticity and Formlessness between Malabou and Bataille’ (MLN, 2022). I have also published an interview with Malabou (‘What Should We Do With Plasticity: An Interview with Catherine Malabou’, Paragraph, 2019); and an interview with the contemporary French novelist Marie Darrieussecq on the subject of (neuro)plasticity (‘Extraordinaire plasticité: Conversation avec Marie Darrieussecq’, French Studies, 2024). I recently co-edited the Special Issue of Film-Philosophy on ‘Catherine Malabou, Plasticity and Film’(2024) alongside Ben Tyrer.

My forthcoming monograph is the first book-length study of Catherine Malabou’s work in relation to literature and film: Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2026).