He is associate professor of Czech at the University of Oxford. From 1999 to 2019 he lectured in Czech and Russian at the University of Bristol. He is the author of monographs on Czech, Russian and Slovak literature written in the late Communist and early post-Communist period (2005) and on the work of Vladislav Vančura (2007), and the lead editor of a volume on the translation of the literatures of small European nations (2020). He has also published many studies on aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first century Czech literature and regularly contributes afterwords to translations of Czech literature into English. He is currently working on the topic of the countryside in inter-war Czech literature. He studied for BA at the University of Sheffield and for his MA and PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.