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Biography

As Associate Professor in Cultural History at the ´óÏó´«Ã½, my research interests are in women's cultures, print media and feminism. I have published on the ways women are represented in a range of media and textual forms including film, magazines, television and radio. I also write about women's fiction, women's modernity and domestic texts, such as cookbooks. I am paticularly intersted in the way periodicals and other texts serve women's political and personal aspirations and enable women's agency both within the home and in the wider world. 

Research interests

My research interests fall into a number of related areas including women’s writing, women’s cultures, feminism, and media representations of women.  I have a particular research and publication interest in women’s magazines and their cultural contexts.  Magazines, lifestyle television, television drama, novels, short stories and science fiction are all media forms and genres which interest me and have informed my writing.  Recent publications include work on feminism and women’s magazines; modernism, war and May Sinclair; and 1970s British television.  I have completed a monograph on women’s magazines, called Magazine Movements: Women's Culture, Feminisms and Media Form, which examines the political and social impact some magazines have had on British women’s history. My collection Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s explores many of the magazines for women across the second half of the twentieth century to the present. I co-ran the Heritage Lottery funded Oral History project, "Women's Community Activism in ´óÏó´«Ã½ since 1960: The Hidden Heritage of a Naval Town." I am continuing this work with a Life Writing project to enable stories to be produced from women's experiences: "Writing Herstories of ´óÏó´«Ã½." I have edited a special edition of Food and Foodways on 'Cookbook Politics', 2023 31(3). Currently, I am preparing another monograph on the ways in which the practice of home sewing has been elevated by the media: The Determined Sewist: Domestic Sewing and the Media.