Victorian literature, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, the gothic, narrative theory, children’s literature, young adult literature

Children’s and Young Adult Literature, African American Youth Literature, Modern American Fiction, Writing Center Theory and Practice

Asian American literature, comics and graphic narratives, children’s and young adult literature, comparative literature, world literature, women’s and gender studies

I’m a PhD student working on my dissertation proposal. My research interests are Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Gothic fiction.

Nineteenth-Century British Literature Interdisciplinary Studies Coming-of-Age Literature Children’s and Young Adult Literature Literature and Culture Romanticism Victorianism The Long Nineteenth Century Women’s and Gender Studies Women’s Literature

Disability Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Body Studies, Life Writing, LLC 19th-Century American Literature, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Digital Humanities, Film and Media Studies

I work at the University of New England in the high country of New South Wales.  I teach and research in children’s literature and classical reception studies.  I lead the Australasian wing of the ERC-funded Our Mythical Childhood project (Grant agreement No 681202) which traces the reception of classical antiquity in children’s and young adults’ culture.  I am writing a Guide to the field of recent children’s literature inspired by classical antiquity.

Victorian studies (especially Dickens, Eliot), fat studies, food studies, Harry Potter, composition, writing centers, English as a second language, fantasy, mythology, Christian poetics, graduate education, film, reader-response theory, fan communities, etymology, trickster figures, children’s and young adult literature, serial fiction

https://hcommons.org/members/laurenbyler/

I’m an interdisciplinarian with a particular interest in children’s and YA literature, the discursive category of adolescence, and the embodied state of being an adolescent girl. I’m also fascinated by contemporary media culture’s role in the production of adolescence/adolescent girls as well as how adolescent girls speak back to those productions. My doctoral work focused on our cultural concern with the adolescent female body and that body’s presentation and construction in popular media and culture. I aruged that YA fantasy offers a sub or countercultural space that is re-mapping the countours of the body and providing alterantive ways of being adolescent girl.   Within this discursive space, I’m particularly interested in how YA fantasy, while participating in bodily concern, manages to present that same body as changeable, unstable and open to possibility. The project is titled, “Myth (Un)Making: Female Heroes in Mythopoeic YA Fantasy”.