About
I’m an interdisciplinarian with a particular interest in children’s and YA literature, the discursive category of adolescence, and the embodied state of being an adolescent girl. I’m also fascinated by contemporary media culture’s role in the production of adolescence/adolescent girls as well as how adolescent girls speak back to those productions.
My doctoral work focused on our cultural concern with the adolescent female body and that body’s presentation and construction in popular media and culture. I aruged that YA fantasy offers a sub or countercultural space that is re-mapping the countours of the body and providing alterantive ways of being adolescent girl.
Within this discursive space, I’m particularly interested in how YA fantasy, while participating in bodily concern, manages to present that same body as changeable, unstable and open to possibility. The project is titled, “Myth (Un)Making: Female Heroes in Mythopoeic YA Fantasy”. Education
PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies (2016) University of Warwick Supervisor: Dr Rachel Moseley. Examiners: Professor Maureen Freely and Dr Jenny Bavidge
MA(Res) Children’s Literature (2010) Reading University
BA(Hons) Humanities with Literature (2008) Open University
From 2003 to 2006, I studied at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and at Chattanooga State Community College. Publications
Challenging Gender in Young Adult Fiction and Film: The Adolescent Female Body and Myth. Forthcoming monograph, 2018. IB Tauris.
“Mapping YA Fantasylands: Maps and Mapping in Mythopoeic YA fantasy” under review with Modern Language Studies.
“Myth (Un)Making: Female Heroes in Mythopoeic YA Fantasy” Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Literature, Forthcoming (reviewed collection).
“The Impossible(ility of) Journey: Tamora Pierce’s Tortall Books” Roundtable, Forthcoming.
“Saving Cinderella: From Disney to Cyborg Princess”, Discusing Disney, Forthcoming (2017).
“‘Real’ Women Aren’t Shiny (or Plastic): The Adolescent Female Body in YA Fantasy” Girlhood Studies 8, no. 3 (Winter 2015). Projects
On the 12th of March 2016, Catherine Lester (Film and TV, Warwick) and I successfully hosted a one-day interdisciplinary conference “‘Let’s Hear it for the Girls”: Girlhood, Media and Popular Culture, 1990-present’, funded by the Humanities Research Centre. Keynote addresses from Prof Carol Dyhouse (University of Sussex) and Prof Rosalind Gill (City University London). Upcoming Talks and Conferences
2017
- “Mapping YA Fantasylands: Maps and Mapping in Mythopoeic YA Fiction” (NeMLA 2017 – Baltimore) 23-26 March.
2016
- “I just send my mind somewhere else”: Shape-Shifting and the Mind/Body Split in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals Quartet (Esse2016 – Galway) 22 – 26 August.
- Relational Models of Self in Mythopoeic YA Fantasy (“Let’s Hear it for the GIrls”: Girlhood, Media and Popular Culture, 1990-present” – University of Warwick) 12 March.
2015
- “Real” Women Aren’t Shiny (or Plastic): The Adolescent Female Body in YA Fantasy (CIRCL Seminar, University of Reading, 11 November)
2014
- Saving Cinderella: From Disney to Cyborg Princess (Discussing Disney – University of Hull) 3 – 4 September.
- Shapeshifters: Animals (or Humans?) in Disguise, a reprise (SF/F Now – Universty of Warwick, UK) 22 – 23 August.
- Shapeshifters: Animals (or Humans?) in Disguise (Reading Animals: An International English Studies Conference – University of Sheffield, UK) 17 – 20 July.
- Mapping (YA) Fantasylands: Tamora Pierce, Kristin Cashore and Marissa Meyer (PG Symposium – University of Warwick, UK) 22 – 23 May.
2013
- Re-contextualising myth: Mythopoeic Young Adult Fantasy and Change (Myth-Making: From Medusa to Madonna – University of Warwick, UK) 18 June 2013.
- “The Impossible(ility of) Journey: Tamora Pierce’s Tortall Books” (Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association – New Mexico, USA) 13-16 Feb 2013.
Memberships
MLA
NeMLA
