Meet the team
Romance Reading Group is run by these English Literature University of Birmingham PhD researchers...
Charlotte Ireland
Charlotte has just completed her PhD at University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the diversifying, politicising and maturing of Anglophone chick lit alongside changing feminist ideologies and genre fluidity. She compares 1990s precursor, popular chick lit novels with newer works in the franchise, exploring to what extent chick lit themes have adapted as the protagonist has matured and feminist theories have shifted. She also compares these precursor works with new emerging women writers, identifying a new strand of genre fluid, diverse, fourth-wave feminist “chick lit.” Charlotte’s research not only demonstrates chick lit’s value in being zeitgeist and political, but also highlights discriminations experienced by women due to their gender, age, race, ethnicity and/or sexual orientation.
Evdokia Valiou
I am a part-tipe PhD student at the University of Birmingham, UK and an EAP tutor at the University of Sheffield. My PhD focuses on the female body in speculative romance (paranormal, fantasy etc.) and the body of the romance genre, which I explore through the lens of Critical Posthumanism, New Materialism and Assemblage Thinking.