I specialise in the practice of remembering and rereading childhood fiction, asking how adults negotiate relationships with books from their pasts. My monograph, Rereading Childhood Books: a Poetics (2019) is published by Bloomsbury and I discuss it on this podcast episode. I have also written on the methodology of 're-memorying' and about ways that men remember The Secret Garden, with the help of a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant. I am currently working on a co-creative project called 'Lifelong Reading: new stories' with older adults at a local day centre.

My other research interest is young adult fiction and adolescence, with a current focus on British YA and the Everyday. I have edited a special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn on Margaret Mahy and a collection of essays on children's and young adult author Melvin Burgess for Palgrave MacMillan's New Casebook series. My first book, Constructions of Adolescence in Fantastic Realism was published with Routledge as part of the Children's Literature and Culture Series, and examined fundamental themes which inform our understanding of 'the teenager' and which can be represented symbolically in fantastic tropes.

I am a member of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature and was on the advisory board of Roehampton's Memories of Fiction project. I am on the Editorial Boards Children's Literature in Education journal and The European Journal for the Study of English, and the 'Studies in European Literature for Children and Youth Adults' book series.

I was co-organiser of the cross-disciplinary, AHRC-funded Memory Network, which from 2012-214 brought together scholars from the arts and humanities, scientists, writers and artists to think critically and creatively about memory. I spoke at one of its public events in 2014 on Remembering Stories.

My work in English studies more generally has included serving on the Executive Committee of University English and representing it on the Board of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE). I worked with the review group for the Subject Benchmark Statement for English

PhD: 'Representing Adolescence in Young Adult Fantastic Realism' (Nottingham Trent, 2005); PGCert: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Roehampton/HEA, 2009).

Young adult fiction; Memory and literature; Reading and rereading. I would welcome enquiries from research students and collaborators with interests in any of these areas.

I teach on both the on-site and distance learning MA programmes in Children's Literature. As well as teaching the core module 'Critical and Theoretical Perspectives' I also offer a special option on young adult fiction for 'Form and Genre 1'. I teach 'Memory and Being' on the undergraduate English curriculum.

I have supervised four PhD projects to completion:

• Nick Cambell: 'Children's Neo-Romanticism: The Archaeological Imagination in Post-War Children's Fantasy.' (2017: minor corrections)
• Erica Gillingham: 'Lesbian Love Stories in Young Adult Literature and Graphic Novels: Narrative Constructions of Same-Sex Relationships between Female Characters across Genre and Form.' (2017: no corrections)
• Anne Malewski: 'Growing Sideways: Shifting Boundaries between CHildhood and Adulthood in Twenty-First Century Britain' (2019: no corrections)
• Sarah Pyke: 'Queer readers remember: The textual and extratextual afterlives of childhood reading for LGBTQ adults' (2019: minor corrections)
• Kay Waddilove: 'Good Enough? Representations of Motherhood in Populist Children's Literature from 1911 to 2011' (2019: no corrections)

I also supervise the following students:

• Emily Corbett: 'Gender-Variant Identities in Twenty-First Century Young Adult Literature'
• Odhran O'Donoghue: 'The ‘Gay Future Child’: an analysis of homonormativity and assimilation in contemporary American LGBT+ young adult fiction'
• Aliona Yarova (with Lulea University): 'Narrating Humanity: Children’s Literature & Globa Citizenship'

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