Literature, critical theory including feminist, psychoanalytical criticism, theories of gender; 20th century literature; women's writing, fantasy literature.

My specialist research and teaching interests are in contemporary literature, critical theory, children's literature psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, theories of fantasy, and textual relations.
I have wide experience of teaching postgraduate and undergraduate courses in 20th Century Literature, Women's Writing, Children's Literature including fantasy literature and fairy tales.
I have successfully supervised a number of PhD theses to completion (see postgraduate student profiles for some recently completed theses). Two doctoral theses in progress focus on internalised racism in American Young Adult Fiction I completed my PhD at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, my MA in the School of Education, University of Southampton, and have QTS from Manchester University. My PhD thesis is titled "Literary Subjectivity and The Feminine in Selected Fictions of Margaret Mahy and Gillian Cross". It draws on French feminist and psychoanalytical criticism (including Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva, Lacan) and focuses on a range of novels by Gillian Cross and Maragret Mahy, including "Pictures in the Dark", "Wolf", "The Tricksters", "The Other Side of Silence", "Memory", and "The Changeover" as paradigms of the feminine as literary aesthetic.
I am currently researching the fictional works of Penelope Lively, and a commissioned article for a special symposium edition of Children's Literature Association Quarterly focusing on the New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy. for February 2014 publication This article focuses on some of Mahy?s later works and adopts a geocritical approach to virtual / real place/space and the posthuman subject drawing on the works of e.g.:Tally, Braidotti, Westphal and Soja. I have been a visiting scholar to the universities of Abo/Turku, Finland (Norchilnet), Stockholm, Antwerp, and also to the universities of Iberoamericana, Puebla, Yucatan, and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. I was Executive Editor (2011) for the journal of the International Research Society for Children's Literature "International Research in Children's Literature" (Edinburgh University Press). I am a member of the Advisory Boards for IRSCL; "Papers" (on-line AUS); Palgrave Macmillan's Children's Literature and Criticism series, and a member of the Review Board for "The Journal of Children's Literature Studies". I am also peer reviewer for a range of refereed journals including "Mosaic:Journal For the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature" (University of Manitoba, CA), "The Lion and the Unicorn" (The Johns Hopkins University Press) and "Children's Literature Association Quarterly" (The Johns Hopkins University Press) and a reader for a number of academic presses including Ohio State UP.