I am Research Associate on Dr Gavin Miller's Leverhulme-funded project ‘A mutual fascination: British horror & the psy disciplines, c. 1955-present’. I joined the project in late 2025, returning to the School of Critical Studies after completing an MLitt in Victorian Literature here in 2017 and undertaking my PhD at the University of Leeds. 

I worked for two years at Lancaster University on the Wellcome-funded Future of Human Reproduction project as part of an interdisciplinarary team researching the the cultural, ethical, legal and social challenges that might emerge as technological advances fundamentally change the possibilities for human reproduction.

Historically, my research interests have been in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. My PhD looked at the legacies of the American Renaissance in the works of contemporary authors Ben Lerner, Marilynne Robinson, George Saunders and Maggie Nelson. I am currently expanding this research to consider as well the works of John Keene, Mat Johnson and Kim Stanley Robinson. A monograph based on this work, Nineteenth-Century Legacies in Contemporary US Literature: A New American Renaissance, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

Both my postdoctoral roles have been in the medical humanites and have focussed on the way medical discourses and ideas intersect with genre fiction. While at Lancaster I looked at the representation of reproductive futures in science fiction literature and film. This work led to two articles for the BMJ: Medical Humanities. The first, 'Reproductive technology’s animal unconscious: multispecies motherhood and humanimal horror', which is co-authored with Dr Dominic O'Key, argues that the horror genre makes visible the suppressed, yet ever-present figure of the animal in narratives about human reproduction and representations of motherhood (Walton, O'Key 2025). And the second, written with Dr Andrew Darby, 'Science Fiction and The Futures of Artificial Womb Technology: Towards a Carrier Bag Theory of Design Fiction' brings together insights from literary theory and design to explore alternative modes of imagining reproductive futures' (Darby, Walton 2026).

In my current role I am building on this work to explore the 'muutal fascination' between psychologised discourse and the horror genre in British culture since the 1950s. You can read more about the project on our blog.

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Prior publications