Languages and Literature, University of Birmingham
Thesis title:
My dissertation explores the post-digital circulation of romance genre texts following long-21st century shifts in systems of publishing and media exchange. Situated within the genre’s history in the English language and drawing upon textual, archival, and qualitative research, I read four axes of encounter – subscription, series, metadata, and community – to draw a topography of contemporary navigational and interpretive circuits in post-digital reading.
"Dark romance: an introduction." Porn Studies, special issue on Popular Romance and Sexuality/Erotica, January 2026, doi:10.1080/23268743.2025.2586593. Peer-reviewed article.
"Romance Self-Publishing and UK Legal Deposit." The British Library, May 2024, https://bl.iro.bl.uk/collections/1844b22c-5ca6-45c6-ae36-b1cc51b4fdcf. Research report.
“‘Like harvest moon, except I ate a guy:’ Graveyard Keeper’s Dark Ecology”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, June 2021, pp. 146-64, doi:10.5283/copas.347. Peer-reviewed article.
“Market Research and the Construction of Genre Readers.” Literary Studies Beyond the Academy seminar, American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, 29 May – 1 June 2025, Online.
“Kindle Unlimited and Risk Economics.” Panel on Platform Authorship, ASAP/15: Association for the Study of Arts of the Present conference, 17 – 19 October 2024, New York, NY, US.
“From Mass Market to Niche Market: Cultivating Reader Publics in Self-Published Popular Romance.” Digitality and the Public Sphere: Literature, Mediality, Practice, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, 30 September – 2 October 2024, Erlangen, DE.
“Self-publishing and legal deposit: lessons from the world of indie romance.” Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing annual meeting, University of Reading, 1 – 5 July 2024, Reading, UK.
“Dark Romance's Consensualities.” Popular Romance Area, Popular Culture Association annual meeting, 28 – 31 March 2024, Chicago, IL, US.
“‘Turn Back Now’: Re-reading Non-consent in the Genre Romance.” The Forgotten Forms of Contemporary Fiction seminar, American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, 14 – 17 March 2024, Montreal, CA.
"Researching Romance." Workshop, Romantic Novelists' Association Conference, 12 August 2023, Imperial College, London.
“Keynote panel: The Birmingham Romance Research Group.” International Association for the Study of Popular Romance 2023 Conference, University of Birmingham, 29 June 2023, Birmingham, UK.
“Autographic transfocalization in the romance: the case of Midnight Sun.” International Association for the Study of Popular Romance 2023 Conference, University of Birmingham, 28 June 2023, Birmingham, UK.
My research involves regular engagement with a number of public and private literary institutions.
As an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, my dissertation project is co-supervised by Katie Barnes-Wallis, the Marketing Operations Director at romance publisher Mills & Boon.
In 2023–2024, I completed a research placement at the British Library on self-publishing and legal deposit, supervised by Ian Cooke within Contemporary British Collections. The resulting report aims to improve the Library’s collections of self-published romance fiction.
I have been quoted on contemporary developments in romance by the Wall Street Journal and The Observer, and appear as the academic expert in a documentary for public broadcaster, arte, on the rise of New Adult in Germany and France.
MA Freie Universität Berlin, North American Studies, 2022
BA Wesleyan University, Studio Art and German Studies, 2014
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