Network Team
Jonathan Foster
(Stockholm University)
Dr Jonathan Foster is currently doing postdoctoral research on the literary culture of British civil service periodicals, 1850–1950. He is co-founder and curator, with Alexandra Irimia, of Bureaucritics: Cultural Bureaucracy Studies Network.
His dissertation, Writing the State: Administrative Fiction in Long-Nineteenth-Century Britain (2025), explores representations of state bureaucracy in the work of Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Foster is also co-editor of Irish Writers in the Civil Service (Liverpool UP, 2026), and of bureaucracy-themed special issues of Administory and The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies.
Alexandra Irimia
(University of Bonn)
Dr. Alexandra Irimia is a Humboldt Fellow with a background in comparative literature and political science. Currently, she is working at the University of Bonn on a project titled Bureaucratic Fiction: Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary World Literature and Film. In October 2025, she organized the international symposium Files, Forms, Fictions: Literary Lives of Bureaucracy, from Ledgers to Algorithms, which served as a launch pad for the network.
Together with Jonathan Foster and Burkhardt Wolf, she co-edited a special issue of the journal Administory (vol. 8), dedicated to administrative cultures and their aesthetics. Her collaboration with Jonathan Foster continued with the newsletter Bureaucritics (since 2024) and the edited volume Bureaucratic Modernism (De Gruyter, 2027).
Her first monograph is Figures of Radical Absence (De Gruyter, 2023). Shorter pieces of her writing appear in Critical Inquiry, The Comparatist, Discourse, Scena9, Ekphrasis, and on the KWI Blog.
Daniel Jenkin-Smith
(University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
Dr Daniel Jenkin-Smith is a literature scholar specialising in the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the cultural, social, and intellectual contexts of office work in the UK and France. This is reflected in his recent monograph, The Rise of Office Literature: Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810-1900 (Bloomsbury, 2025), as well as in related publications in Nineteenth-Century Literature, The European Journal of English Studies, European Romantic Review.
He is currently a lecturer in academic skills at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, a tutor in film at the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, and he also co-hosts a podcast on classic literature, Save Me From My Shelf.
Nicola Bishop
(De Montfort University)
Dr Nicola Bishop is a popular culture researcher who explores white-collar work and the office as a setting across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly on television and in literature. Her first monograph, Lower-Middle-Class Nation: The White-Collar Worker in British Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021), explored white-collar workers in the office, the suburbs and on the commute across cultural texts as varied as The Diary of a Nobody, Dad’s Army and The Office. She has also published on crime fiction, higher education practice and using television as a historical source.
Nicola is currently Academic Enhancement Lead at De Montfort University, UK.
Alexandra Müller
(Justus-Liebig-University Giessen)
Dr Alexandra Müller is a researcher in comparative literature and media culture studies. Her habilitation treatise „Poetik des Büros“ examines representations of ‘office’ culture in literature, film, art und new media from Ancient Egypt to the twenty-first century. She has published articles on fantastic offices, bureaucracy in poetry and videogames, office novels, or bureaucratic life writing. She is currently a lecturer in German Studies/Comparative Literature at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Her research interests include cultural trauma studies, inter- and transmediality, contemporary literature, and pop culture.
Bureaucritics 