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.

My book, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny, asks the following question: how does the built and natural environment contribute to our sense of self? Traditionally, the response to this question has been to focus on notions of dwelling, locality, and home. The contribution my research makes to this field is to redirect the focus toward liminal, ambiguous, and transitory places. To this end, a large part of my book is spent phenomenologically examining the spatio-temporality of monuments, black holes, train stations, airports, haunted houses, motorways, and sites of trauma, with a specific appeal to their ambiguous memorability. Methodologically, I achieve this aim by building on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body, emphasising in particular the tension between cognitive and corporeal modes of intentionality. In doing so, I advance several new modes of place memory, all of which conspire to undermine the notion that certain places—emblematically the "home"—are more memorable than others.

In my first book, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason, I pursue a phenomenological analysis of place, 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.