Associate Professor in Popular Fiction, University of Birmingham
My research interests lie in popular fiction (especially romance). I am interested in genre fiction, publishing, women’s writing, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and migration.
I have published research on:
* contemporary women’s historical fiction
* sexualisation and women’s advice literature
* medieval and modern literary representations of virginity
* class and wealth in popular romance fiction
* chick lit from the Middle East
* imperialism in the medieval romance Emaré
* Scottish popular romance in the twentieth century
* migration fiction.
I have edited special issues on E. M. Hull's early twentieth-century classic novel, The Sheik, multi-disciplinary approaches to critical love studies, and medieval romance, gender and materiality.
My first book, Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance (Palgrave, 2016) is a comparative study of Orientalism in medieval and modern popular romance and compares the representation of erotic relationships across religious and cultural borders in late medieval Orientalist romance (1330-1450) and British and North American post 9/11 romantic fiction.
I m Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded Muslim Women's Popular Fiction research network: https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/
I am the Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies: https://www.jprstudies.org/
China's Treasury "Nuclear Option": Bluff or Reality?