Theory & Criticism

A specialist in British Romanticism, I work at the intersection of poetics and critical theory, with a particular interest in how literary language both registers and participates in the historical production of race. My current book project, The Rhetoric of Racialization: British Romanticism and Everyday Antiblackness, elucidates the quotidian figural operations that consolidated logics of antiblackness in the early nineteenth century.

My name is Tom and I’m in the first year of my MA at UVA. I graduated with a BA in English from University College London in 2003 and an MA in Issues in Modern Culture, also from University College London, in 2004. Since then, I’ve worked in publishing, as a literary agent, and in publishing tech and mobile games. I am the author of A Mysterious Something In The Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler (Aurum Press 2012 / Chicago Review Press 2014 / Benvira 2014 / University of Nanking Press 2020) and I have reviewed books for The Observer, The Irish Times and The Spectator.

Nasrin Olla is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African American Studies. Nasrin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Nasrin is currently completing her first book project, The Right to Opacity, which engages with the theme of alterity across a range of contemporary African and African diasporic literature.

I am an international student from India, and before coming to UVA, I did my master's in liberal studies, with a concentration in English, at Ashoka University. I am interested in the everyday, the domestic, the boring and how our identities mediate our experiences and beings in these spaces. The approach I take to these questions, and to scholarship in general, is firmly interdisciplinary. At UVA, I have been a Democracy Initiative Graduate Seminar Fellow and have completed the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Graduate Certificate.