Associate Professor in Cultural History, Faculty of Creative & Cultural Industries, School of Film, Media & Communication

I welcome the supervision of PhD projects in many areas of women's studies. These include: women's cultural history of the twentieth century, women's magazines, feminist histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Women's Liberation Movement, women's representation on television, and the cultural history of cookbooks.

Biography

As Associate Professor in Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth, 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 particularly interested 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. My specialism in women's magazines and feminism has led to projects as diverse as the 2009 AHRC-funded 1970s 'British Film and Visual Culture' research project, and the 2019 Heritage Lottery funded project 'Hidden Histories of a Naval Town'. This recent project has been taken up by the Imperial War Museum, is the focus of a research documentary for the University of Portsmouth, and has a plaque which commemorates its participants in the Portsmouth Guildhall square. 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. I have given keynote lectures and public talks in many settings, such as: the Feminist Book Fortnight at the University of Nottingham; The Women's Library at LSE London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum.