Team
Paloma Fresno Calleja is Professor of English at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), where she teaches Postcolonial Literatures. Her research focuses on New Zealand and Pacific literatures, on which she has published numerous book chapters and articles. She has co-edited (with Janet Wilson) the volume Beyond Borders. New Zealand Literature in the Global Marketplace (Routledge, 2023) and (with Melissa Kennedy) a Special Issue of Interventions. An International Journal of Postcolonial Studies entitled “Island Narratives of Persistence and Resistance” (vol 25.1, forthcoming 2023). She is currently co-editing with Hsu-Ming Teo a volume on Romantic Historical Fiction. In the context of this project, she is working on a corpus of New Zealand and Pacific romantic novels.
Amy Burge is an Associate Professor in Popular Fiction at the University of Birmingham. Her teaching and research interests are in popular fiction, in particular romance, both medieval and modern. Her work is intersectional and focuses on gender, ethnicity and sexuality. He is currently working on a literary history of romantic masculinity and a project exploring Arab and Muslim women’s genre fiction. She is the author of Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance (Palgrave, 2016), a comparative study of Orientalism in medieval and modern popular romance. She has edited special issues of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (on E.M. Hull’s The Sheik and Critical Love Studies) and published numerous articles and book chapters.
Cristina Cruz Gutiérrez has a PhD in English from the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), where she is currently an assistant lecturer. Her research is in the field of African literatures and gender studies, with special attention to national identity and gender in the work of contemporary Nigerian women writers. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Contemporary Women’s Writing or Continuum. As part of the project, she is exploring contemporary romantic novels by Nigerian female authors.
Jayashree Kamblé is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College in the City University of New York. She is the author of Making Meaning in Popular Romance Fiction: An Epistemology (2014) and of the forthcoming Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation (Indiana University Press, 2023). She co-edited (with Eric Selinger and Hsu-Ming Teo) the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2021) and currently serves as the President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.
Carolina Fernández Rodríguez is an Associate Professor at the University of Oviedo (Spain), where she teaches American Literatures and Cultures. Her research focuses on contemporary women’s writing. Early on in her career she focused on feminist revisions of fairy tales, a topic on which she has written three books and several articles. More recently, she has been interested in the representation of latinidades in American literature and mass media, and in issues related to multiculturalism as portrayed in children’s and young adults’ literature. In 2016 she started working on the genre of popular romance, and published articles on Nora Roberts’s Boonsboro trilogy and on WWII romances by Chamorro/CHamoru writers (from the island of Guam/Guåhån), among other topics. She has also authored a book on historical romances: American Quaker Romances: Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation (University of Valencia, 2021).
Aurora García Fernández is an Associate Professor at the University of Oviedo (Spain), where she teaches Postcolonial Studies and Cultures of the Anglophone World. Her interests lie mainly in Postcolonial and Global Studies and in Australian literature, as well as in curriculum design and methodology. She has co-edited Translating Cultures (1999) and is the author of a monography on Australian historical fiction, La revisión postcolonial de la historia de Australia en la obra de Patrick White y Peter Carey (2001), as well as several articles and book chapters mostly on Australian fiction. She coordinated the new syllabus of the Degree in English Studies and, as a vocational educator, she has been involved in several innovation teaching projects.
Inés Hernández Martínez is currently completing her PhD Thesis at the University of Oviedo. Her research focuses on the depiction of non-normative or dissident relationships in contemporary fiction written in English. In particular, she explores ethical or consensual non-monogamies and whether their portrayal give or fail to give an accurate account of how these new relational models are gaining popularity in Western societies.
Heike Mißler is a senior lecturer at Saarland University, where she teaches British Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research interests include gender and queer theory, feminist theory, critical race studies, critical whiteness studies, contemporary British novels, popular romance studies, chick lit, and TV and film studies. Her monograph The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit: Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation (Routledge, 2017) analyses chick lit as a cultural phenomenon and focuses on the representation of gender and race in selected chick-lit texts. In the context of this project, Heike is exploring contemporary British romance novels from an intersectional perspective.
Irene Pérez-Fernández is an Associate Professor in English Studies at the University of Oviedo (Spain). Her research focuses on contemporary British literature with a special interest in the literary works of Black British Women Writers. She has published on the works of Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Diana Evans in various journals (Atlantis, Callaloo, Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and has translated Joan Anim-Addo’s short story “Daughter and His Housekeeper” into Spanish (Revolución y Cultura). She is the author of Espacio, Identidad y Género: Aproximaciones Teóricas (2009) and Maggie Gee: “The Artist/Artista” (2011), and has co-edited Romantic Escapes: Post-Millennial Trends in Contemporary Popular Romance Fiction (2021).
Inmaculada Pérez-Casal is an assistant lecturer in English language and literature at the University of Vigo (Spain). She holds a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela, and her doctoral dissertation, funded by the Regional Government of Galicia, investigated the evolution of the contemporary romance novel in English in relation to feminism and the fight for gender equality. She has published several articles and book chapters on mass-market romance fiction in international journals and edited books. Her current research centres on contemporary YA romance novels written by Latinx authors and explores how these authors problematize dominant discourses around love, race and gender.
Miquel Pomar Amer an assistant lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), where he teaches English Language and Literatures. He completed his PhD at the University of Manchester with a dissertation that compared a selection of novels and autobiographical works written by British-Pakistani and Catalan-Moroccan authors. His research interests include the representation of identity in literature, especially in postcolonial contexts of migration and diaspora, the ethical and political relations between text and context, and the representation of the encounter between locals and tourists in works set in the Mediterranean. He has published several articles and book chapters on these topics and is currently exploring a corpus of romantic novels by female writers of Pakistani descent.
Mariana Ripoll-Fonollar is a lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), where she obtained her PhD in 2023. Her thesis focused on the figure of the suffragette in contemporary British fiction and includes a discussion of the use of suffrage in popular romance novels. In the context of this research project, her work focuses on a corpus of Indo-Canadian, African-Canadian and Chinese-Canadian romance authors and their engagement with identity politics in the context of Canadian multiculturalism.
Astrid Marie Schwegler Castañer has a PhD in English from the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), where she is assistant lecturer. Her research focuses on Australia fiction, and she is particularly interested in notions of ethnicity, belonging and identity in the work of Asian-Australian authors, Food Studies and popular culture. Her work has appeared in international journals such as Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, or Feminist Media Studies. In the context of this project, Astrid is exploring love stories in the work of Asian-Australian authors.
Hsu-Ming Teo is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, and the Head of the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University (Australia). Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), the edited volume, The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (2017), and the co-edited volumes Cultural History in Australia (2003), and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020). She is currently co-editing with Paloma Fresno-Calleja the volume ‘Repairing the Past, Repurposing History: Conflict, colonialism, and exoticism in 21st century romantic historical fiction’. Hsu-Ming is an editorial board member of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies and the Journal of Australian Studies. She has published widely on historical fiction, Orientalism, imperialism, popular culture, love and popular romance studies, and she is starting work on romantic narratives in the fiction of Aboriginal Australian author Anita Heiss.