Dr Leanne Waters

Dr Waters is an adjunct lecturer at the School of English, Drama and Film in University College Dublin. Her primary research areas include literature of the long nineteenth century, bestsellers, popular culture, modernity, and transatlantic exchange. She is currently in the process of completing her first monograph under the working title of God in the Marketplace: Christianity, Melodrama, and the Late-Victorian Bestseller.
As a Fulbright-NUI Scholar, she will be carrying out archival research at DePaul University in Chicago for her next monograph, Transatlantic Frontiers: The Emergence of the Western in Nineteenth-Century Popular Boys’ Fiction. The project analyses the defining features of the modern Western, as well as the material processes that aided its emergence and tremendous popularity between 1879 and 1914. While frontier fiction of this time was crucial to the formation of national (American) identities, this monograph examines the extent to which it was also part of broader, transatlantic paradigms and communities, which were rooted in and dictated by market conditions, as well as cultural exchange between Britain and America.