Laura is an associate Professor in Medicine and English Literature and am currently the Director of Postgraduate Research. She has research and teaching interests in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; neuroscience and language.

Laura has published widely on the work of Samuel Beckett, including a monograph entitled Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). This academic year, she is completing another monograph — Aphasic Modernism: Revolutions of the Word — which is a study of the relationship between modernism, modernity, and early twentieth-century neuroscientific conceptions of language. Laura is also beginning research for a book for Edinburgh University Press called Slow Modernism.

Laura is a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded research Network Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind with Ulrika Maude (Bristol) and Elizabeth Barry (Warwick). With Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck), she is beginning a critical theoretical study of Waiting Times in the NHS.