Originally from Sydney, I lived in India and Canberra, but grew up in Melbourne. My interest in Spanish language and culture dates from 1988 when I started learning the language privately before travelling throughout Spain in 1989-90. I became interested in Catalan culture through friends and, as part of my B.A. at La Trobe University, I studied history, Spanish and Catalan language and literature. Thanks to several grants from the Australian and Catalan governments, I was able to study in Barcelona, where I lived on and off for several years whilst completing my PhD. I returned to Australia in 1999 and since then have taught in the Spanish and Latin American Studies, Literary Studies and European Languages majors at La Trobe and Monash  Universities. In recognition for my work in Catalan, Spanish and Latin American Studies in 2016 I was elected President of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (2016-2019) and, in 2021, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

My research interests focus on two broad areas: Spanish and Catalan Studies and Crime fiction as a form of world literature.

Spanish and Catalan Studies

My research in these interconnected fields was first established through my work on the construction of Catalan identities in literature written in both Spanish and Catalan and later on the role of crime fiction in post-Franco, democratic Spain. My book, Escribir la catalanidad. Lenguas e identidades en la narrativa contemporánea de Cataluña (Tamesis 2005), employs post-colonial theories to develop a substantial and controversial re-evaluation of Catalan authors who write in Castilian (Spanish) that challenges how Catalan literature is conceived. 

My major contribution to the field of crime fiction from Spain has been to question the inherent Spanishness of “Spanish” crime fiction by exploring the construction of competing national and cultural identities in crime novels written in Castilian (Spanish) as well as Catalan, Galician and Basque.

Crime Fiction as World Literature

In 2012 I was appointed the coordinator of the International Literatures stream of the revised undergraduate major in Literary Studies. My teaching practice in the areas of comparative literature, world literature, and literature in translation led to my developing an innovative research interest in crime fiction as a form of world literature. In 2013 I co-organised an international conference on this area with Prof. Stephen Knight (University of Melbourne) with whom I co-edited The Global Crime Scene, a special issue of Clues (2014), the leading Anglo-American journal of crime fiction studies. In 2014 I published the first scholarly article examining crime fiction within a world literature framework. This article is one of the first to orient world literature studies towards a popular fiction genre and away from its traditional focus on classics of world literature. The article has been described as “the most useful intervention in this emerging field of study” (Andrew Pepper, Unwilling Executioner, OUP 2016). I have published several articles and book chapters in this area and I am currently working on a book-length study of world crime fiction.

I am willing to supervise MA and PhD students in the following areas or fields: Spanish and Catalan literary and cultural studies from the nineteenth-century until the present day, crime fiction from around the globe, translation studies and the theory and practice of world and comparative literatures.