Broadly, I am interested in the relationship between place, memory, and embodiment from a phenomenological perspective. More specifically, I am interested in how liminal and ambiguous places can contribute to the formation of identity, both personal and collective. In my work so far, I have attended to this dynamic from the perspective of the urban landscape, the site of trauma, and the temporally discontinuous spatiality of the modern ruin.

In my book, The Aesthetics of Decay, I pursue a phenomenological analysis of place memory, which extends to the urban ruin. Establishing the ruin as a place of temporal subversion, I examine how rationality and nostalgia are contested by a model of progressive decline, embodied in the ruin in terms of the uncanny.

My doctoral thesis, Memory and Place: a Phenomenological Study, continues my research on place and memory through developing a threefold analysis of everyday, transitional, and traumatic memory. Beginning with an account of how the past is preserved in place and time, the thesis goes on to explore issues such as:

• The relation between memory, imagination, and identity.

• The transition from memory to history.

• The embodied representation of silence.

• The ambiguous fusion between place and non-place.

• The phenomenology of "alien flesh."

• The spatio-temporality of nostalgia.

• The pathological attachment to places.

• The body memory of trauma.

• The phenomenology of haunted places. 

• The immateriality of ruins.

I am currently revising my thesis for publication as a book. Future research will concern the relationship between memory and eroticism, the art of Patrick Nagel, and the phenomenology of bio-horror.