I am currently working on the romance novels of Jennifer Crusie and Mills & Boon/Harlequin romances. As a contributor to Teach Me Tonight, an academic blog devoted to the study of romance novels, I have written many posts about the romance genre. Descriptions of some of the topics I've covered, and a list of all the individual romances I've analysed on the blog, can be found on the Links page.

I began my academic career at the University of St Andrews, where I gained my Ph.D in the area of Hispanomedievalism. My particular interest was in attitudes towards death in fifteenth-century Castile. Information about my work in this and other areas of Hispanomedievalism can be found in the section on 'Hispanomedievalism'.

Many months before the deadline by which I had to submit my thesis, I had another event to look forward to, in this case a birthline. My son was born a few months before I sat my viva. Although I then worked on preparing my thesis and articles for publication, this was a very significant turning point in my career.

As a stay-at-home parent caring for a young child, I soon found that while a memento mori may be spiritually edifying, it is not particularly cheering, and I soon turned to reading romances. These much maligned texts deal with the cheerful topic of requited love, marking a significant departure from my work on Spanish sentimental romances and Celestina. Yet they too reveal much about the ideologies of those who write them. They explore attitudes towards love, friendship, marriage and motherhood, and many do so from a feminist perspective. Like fifteenth-century cancionero poetry, at a first glance they may appear repetitive, with the work of one author barely distinguishable from that of another. A closer acquaintance with them, however, reveals significant differences. Soon I had a list of favourite romance authors, and I knew about romance's various sub-genres. Academic habits are hard to break, and it wasn't long before I began to analyse the romances I was reading.