Christopher is an Associate Professor of Learning and Teaching. He teaches Literature within the School of Creative Arts and is a Learning and Teaching Specialist in LTIC. He joined the University in January 2016.

His research interests include: contemporary US literature; cultures of the US South; cultural memory; queer studies; Black studies; inclusive pedagogy; diversification and 'decolonisation' within HE; and ungrading.

Christopher welcomes PhD proposals on any aspect of the above research fields.

Christopher is the author of two monographs: Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century American South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Both books investigate the extent to which contemporary cultural texts about the US South - literature, film, television, visual art, memorials - reveal an ongoing negotation and remediation of the region's past, especially in relation to African American memory. 

He is also the co-editor of The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies, with Hilary Emmett (Routledge, 2023); and a collection in progress, the Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel, with Loïc Bourdeau (EUP).

He is also working on a third monograph called A Queer Bestiary: The Non/Human in Contemporary US Literature.

Other publications include:

- Journal articles on writers and artists such as Garth Greenwell, Sally Mann, Keith Morris Washington, Barbara Kingsolver, Jesmyn Ward, Kathryn Stockett and others.

- Book chapters on writers such Bernice L. McFadden, Tom Franklin and Beth Fennelley, Marilynne Robinson, Colson Whitehead, and film/tv such as Get Out, Girls, Black Snake Moan, True Blood, and Treme.

- Journal special issues on: American Exceptionalism; The twenty-first-century Southern Novel; American topographic photography.

A recent article on slavery in contemporary US culture is published with The Conversation. He has also been interviewed on Mary Anne Hobbs' Radio 6 Music show about his MA module "US Culture and #BlackLivesMatter" and has discussed the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race on the podcast OFFCUTS: Celebrating Cult Film and Television, hosted by Dr Darren Elliott-Smith.

Chris also reviews books on his YouTube site: Books Up Close.

He is a member of the university's "diversifying and decolonising" group who have produced a website and podcast among other outputs in the past few years.

Doctoral Supervision:

- Stevie Kilgour (Creative Writing): contemporary poetry and working-class masculinity (2019-2023)

- Gboyega Odubanjo (Creative Writing): Black studies and poetics

- Sara de Souza (Education): belonging and transformation for Black students (2020-)

- Tionne Parris (History): Black women and communism (2022-)

2019-20 Teaching:

- 'Texts Up Close: Reading and Interpretation' (L4)

- 'American Voices: Introduction to US Literature and Culture' (L4)

- 'Identity and Contemporary Writing' (L4) 

- 'Introduction to American Studies' (L4)

- 'Making America: Studies in American Culture and Society' (L4)

- 'Twentieth-Century North American Writing' (L5)

- 'Twenty-First-Century American Writing' (L6)

- 'US Culture and #BlackLivesMatter' (L7)

Previous Teaching Includes: 

- 'Writing and Revolution: Literature from the Romantics to Victorians' (L4)

- 'Technology, Terror and Transformation: Literature from the Fin de Siècle to the First World War' (L4)

- 'Enlightenment Literature' (L5)

- 'American Literature to 1900' (L5)