I am Lecturer in Children's Literature and Culture at the Discipline of Children's Studies. I have a background in Languages and English literature, and through my career I have developed an interdisciplinary research profile that encompasses literary studies, history, and medical humanities.

 I completed my PhD at the School of English, University of Galway, in 2017 with a thesis on dissection and bodily integrity anxieties in Victorian popular fiction, which became my first monograph, Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine, and Anatomy - The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

My interest in how fiction targeting marginalised and/or powerless constituencies incorporated health concerns relating to its audience led me to focus on nineteenth-century children's literature and the history of child nutrition. This was the basis of FED - Feeding, Educating, Dieting: a Transnational Approach to Nutrition Discourses in Children's Narratives (Britain and Italy, 1850-1900), the project I developed as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice from 2019 to 2021.

My current project MILC - MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child health (1850-1914), which I am developing with funding from the IRC Starting Laureate Award scheme I received in 2022, is a transnational comparative study of childcare books written in English, French, and Italian.

I have a commitment to mentorship and research supervision: I have supervised MA and postdoctoral researchers, and I have been a mentor within the International Research Society of Children's Literature (IRSCL) Mentorship Scheme since 2022. My research interests cover a broad range of topics, including children's literature and culture, child health history and culture, nineteenth-century literature and culture, food studies, body theory, and discourse theory. Recently, I have also started incorporating distant reading methodologies in my work, using digital humanities tools to gather and analyse data concerning authorship, editorship, and the relationship between author and reader. I am especially interested in supervising literary research devoted to understanding issues of health related to underprivileged, exposed, andor powerless groups, mainly the poor, children and teens; and research projects that explore food in children's and teen literature, culture, and history. 

• Children's literature and culture
• Child health history and culture
• C19th literature and culture
• Food studies
• Body theory
• Discourse theory

• Literature
• History
• Academic Skills