Alison Waller

You can find out more about my research interests and projects here

I specialise in young adult fiction and my current project is a study of ordinariness in contemporary British YA. I am the author of Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (Routledge 2009) and General Editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature.

I am also an expert in the practice of remembering and rereading childhood fiction, and my latest monograph, Rereading Childhood Books: a Poetics (Bloomsbury 2019) examined how adults negotiate relationships with books from their pasts. 

I enjoy collaboration, and recently led a co-creative project ‘Lifelong Reading: New Stories’, working with a day centre specialising in dementia. I was co-organiser for ‘The Memory Network’, which brought together scholars working in arts and humanities and science. I am now collaborating with schools and young people to create digital YA reading communities for my Covid-19 related project, ‘Reading for Normal.’

I am a member of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature.

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. I teach 'Memory and Being' and 'British Young Adult Fiction' on the undergraduate English curriculum.

I have supervised these 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'

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