James Purdon studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was a Herchel Smith scholar at Harvard, and worked as a parliamentary reporter before completing his doctorate in 2012. After three years as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, he joined the School of English as a Lecturer in 2015 and was appointed to a Senior Lectureship in 2022. His writing has appeared in scholarly journals including Essays in Criticism, Modernist Cultures, and the Review of English Studies, as well as mass-market publications including The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, and Apollo.

James researches the intersections of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary narrative with technology, media, and politics, and he has particular interests in modernist studies, Cold War-era culture, contemporary fiction, and the visual arts. His first book — Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State (Oxford University Press, 2016) — showed how new forms of surveillance and data-gathering by states influenced fiction and film at the birth of the information age, with a particular focus on figures such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, John Sommerfield, and John Grierson.

His other books include The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity (Penn State University Press, 2021 – co-edited with Rex Ferguson and Melissa M. Littlefield), which focuses on the relationship between modern forms of identity and the media in which those forms are created and verified; British Literature in Transition, 1900-1920: A New Age? (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which surveys literary culture in Britain and the British Empire in the early years of the twentieth century; and Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), which collects a series of essays designed to reintroduce and revivify the work of a major twentieth-century Scottish writer.

With David Trotter and Steven Connor, James edits the open-access book series Technographies (Open Humanities Press), which publishes new and innovative scholarship at the intersection of writing and technology.