Alison Waller

My research in young adult literature and adolescence asks:

• how do ideas of ordinariness and extraordinariness shape our understanding of adolescence?
• what can national histories of YA literature tell us about our narratives of youth, society, and the future?
• what benefits can reading YA have for mental wellbeing?

My research in age studies, memory, reading and wellbeing asks:

• how do adults negotiate relationships with books from their pasts?
• where do discourses of old age and youth intersect and how can this aid intergenerational understanding?
• what part can forgetting play in being human at any age?
• how can reading help us cope with threats of loneliness or anxiety?

I am the author of Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (Routledge 2009) and established The International Journal of Young Adult Literature. My latest monograph, Rereading Childhood Books: a Poetics (Bloomsbury 2019), explores the practice of remembering and rereading childhood fiction and was shortlisted for the ESSE Book Prize. 

I enjoy interdisciplinary and international collaboration and developing partnerships:

• I was Principal Investigator for the British Academy-funded 'Reading for Normal: Young People and YA Fiction in the Time of Covid-19' project and developed the Reading4Normal Book Club, a funded national programme based on this research.
• I am working with Cheltenham Literary Festival's 'Teachers Reading, Pupils Reading' programme to deliver workshops and training to secondary educators.
• My ‘Lifelong Reading: New Stories’ project allowed me to collaborate with individuals living with dementia, creative practitioners, and a specialist day centre.
• I was co-organiser for the AHRC-funded ‘The Memory Network’, which brought together scholars working in arts and humanities and science.

I have taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and convened the MA Children's Literature by distance learning eight years. Modules I have designed and delivered include:

• ‘Memory and Being’ (UG)
• ‘British Young Adult Fiction’ (UG)
• ‘Critical and Theoretical Perspectives in Children’s Literature’ (MA)
• ‘Research Methods’ and ‘Dissertation’ (MA)

I have supervised five PhD projects to completion, on the following topics: Children's Neo-Romanticism; Lesbian Love Stories in YA Literature; Shifting Boundaries between Childhood and Adulthood; Textual Afterlives of Childhood Reading for LGBTQ Adults; Representations of Motherhood in Popularist Children's Literature; and Transgender YA. I won the Student-Led Teaching Award for 'Best Research Supervisor'.

I am currently supervising Odhran O'Donoghue: 'The "Gay Future Child": an analysis of homonormativity and assimilation in contemporary American LGBT+ young adult fiction'

Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy

Advisory Board member, YA Studies Association.

Editorial Board Member: European Journal of English Studies; Children’s Literature in Education journal; Angilca Wratislaviensia journal; ‘Studies in European Literature for Children and Young Adults’ book series

PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

PGCert: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Roehampton/HEA.

BA (Hons), University of Birmingham.

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