Research Interests

My work sits at the intersection of digital culture and publishing studies, basically, the platforms, communities, and algorithms that now shape how books get written, marketed, and read. That's meant looking at how BookTok has reshaped which genres and books actually sell, and how things like nostalgia and pop music (shout out to Gilmore Girls and Taylor Swift), how self-publishing ecosystems are shifting (and sometimes just relocating), and who holds cultural power. And increasingly I find myself pulled beyond publishing too: how online communities form, how platforms shape creative labour, how cultural production generally is getting reworked by all the same force.

As part of this, I’m very interested in the ideas around how users navigate digital spaces and what that means for our identities, and we don’t do this navigation in isolation, we can see how brands, social spaces, and other individuals move and set down roots in the cultural landscape. People often use this knowledge to decide how we want to perform our sense of identity to better help us move through a cultural space that both exists digitally and offline. This navigation is part of what I wrote about in The Power of Brand Ownership. The book draws on concepts of landscape studies, platforms studies, branding, and identity, to show how all of this fits. Maybe one day I will create a visual map that helps us visualise this theoretical space.

AI, Authorship, and Augmentation: when a machine can write something convincing, what does that actually leave for the rest of us? I'm interested in what it means to be an author now, where the industry's guardrails are (or should be), and, more excitingly, how we can actually use new technologies to make publishing better and more accessible.

A lot of this comes down to power and labour, who's actually doing the creative work, who gets credit for it, and who profits when AI starts doing some of that work instead. Those questions don't stay neatly inside publishing. They show up in art, in music, in journalism, and in HE too: the same arguments about authorship, ownership, and what counts as "your own work" are playing out in classrooms as much as in books. If we're serious about protecting authorship in one space, we probably need to be serious about it everywhere.

It's also why I've been getting hands-on with these things (beyond my work with Dudley Editions), building small AI agents and simulations to see how these dynamics actually play out and can do small tasks and streamline some publishing pipelines, rather than just theorising about them from a distance.

While I’m not the biggest reader of genre fiction, fan fiction, or romance; I do LOVE it all. The fact that these forms of writing can be sites of feminist practice, shifting capital, and cultural resistance is something that keeps me digging into these area and really excited.

On the topic of genre fiction, you can find one of my articles on the topic here. It was also the reason I was invited out to the uni of Oslo a few years ago to speak about the topic.

My first book, Books and Social Media, looked at online writing and how communities engage in digitally social spaces, those that we might not always think of as ‘social media’. In that work I considered a piece of original fiction written on Wattpad, but this has led to a lot of research, reading, and supervision (of MAs, UGs, and MA by Research) of fan fiction. I also now teach sessions on fan fictions, authorship, AI, and how these things form particular types of digital cultures, often according to the platform affordances. Gotta love Jenkins, right?

I am also really interested in how my FYP is filled with BookToks, mostly of romance. I admit, I do lean into it and watch them to see what people are sharing, what sorts of hooks and content formats work, so it’s no wonder that I’m served quite a lot. Alongside this, we have concepts of the ‘book boyfriend’ and a whole digital (and analogue) community based around genres and subgenres within romance. I’m not just talking the engagement around things like ACOTAR, but also much more specifics community spaces where the use of hashtags, follows, and the algorithms, can help readers find their in group. There are also other platforms coming in to fill the void in being able to find exactly what you want to read in the world of romance (romance.io), where if you want to read an age-gap romance with two men as main characters, where one is a cop/firefighter/in uniform, and there is a hint of fantasy and a LOT of spice, you can now filter down to find what you want. It’s great.

With this in mind, what I’m currently working on is a project that maps how romance bestsellers (2001-2025) function as cultural infrastructure: a system through which intimacy norms are produced, packaged, and amplified through the feedback loop linking publisher strategy, retail economics, and user-based platform classifications. Using a mixed-methods approach combining longitudinal bestseller data, metadata, user tags, paratextual and cover analysis, social media data, and qualitative interviews with industry stakeholders, the focus is finding out how publishing markets and platform classification systems shape which intimacy norms become mainstream, and how has that co-production changed over twenty-five years?

My work in immersive technology is spearheaded by my role in founding and editing Immersive Technologies, a new academic journal with Taylor and Francis.

From the Journal page: Immersive Technologies is a forum for researchers, practitioners, users, and industry specialists to facilitate research and understanding of immersive technology spaces. It creates a synergy between the practitioners and innovators of immersive technologies and the scholarly research being done in the field.

I also am really interested in how immersive tech can be developed and used to create more inclusive tools and environments within the humanities and digital culture.