Research interests in Modernism and Empire, and in colonial and postcolonial literature. Articles and chapters on Aboriginal writing, Mansfield, Lessing, Ngugi, Dangarembga, Mauritian writing, Jack Mapanje. Editor, with introduction and notes, of Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics (1997); editor, with introduction and notes, of Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, Oxford University Press World's Classics. Author of East African Writing in English (1989); Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999); and Katherine Mansfield: a Literary Life (2000). Work in progress: study of cultural nationalism in a group of early twentieth-century writers and painters including J D Fergusson, Katherine Mansfield, Emily Carr and Margaret Preston.