Dr Melanie Waters

Melanie's research investigates the dynamic relationship between feminism, form and politics in twentieth-century literature and culture. Much of her recent work instrumentalises the latest research on activism and affect, alongside philosophies of time, to shed distinctive new light on a range of feminist writing, including poetry, novels, non-fiction, and drama. 

Melanie is especially interested in feminist periodicals and how they have shaped feminist subjects, debates and campaigns from the 1960s onwards. This is the focus of the AHRC-funded project Liberating Histories: Women's Movement Magazines, Media Activism and Periodical Pedagogies and the monograph Feminist Periodicals and the UK Women's Movement: Networks of Feeling Since 1968 (EUP), which she is currently co-authoring with Dr Victoria Bazin and Dr Eleanor Careless. 

Her first book, Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (with Dr Rebecca Munford), examines the peculiar temporality of postfeminist through reference to the complex ways in which popular culture negotiates debates within and about feminism. The changing role of feminism in public-sphere discourses continues to inform Melanie's research, from her articles on the magazines Ms., Spare Rib and Just Seventeen to her most recent publications about the novels of Doris Lessing, Marilyn French and Lisa Alther. 

Melanie's research has featured in The Times and USA Today. 

She welcomes research proposals on any aspect of feminism, or in any of the areas indicated above. 

• Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
• Periodical Feminisms: Form and Feeling in UK Women's Movement Magazines, Bazin, V., Waters, M., Careless, E. Jun 2026
• The Logics and Rhetorics of Theft in 1970s Feminist Writing, Waters, M. 3 Jul 2025, Money and American Literature, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press
• Wasting time? The politics and poetics of feminist waiting, Waters, M. 3 Aug 2023, In: Textual Practice
• What's the Time, Anna Wulf? Crisis, Temporality and Feminist Untimeliness in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Waters, M. 22 Dec 2023, In: MFS - Modern Fiction Studies
• Risky Ms.-ness? The Business of Women’s Liberation Periodicals in the 1970s, Waters, M. 2 Oct 2021, In: Women: A Cultural Review
• ‘Everything a girl could ask for’? Fashioning Feminism in Just Seventeen, Waters, M. 1 Oct 2020, Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press
• Bad Sex and the City? Feminist (Re)Awakenings in HBO’s Girls, Waters, M. 23 Jul 2017, Reading Lena Dunham's Girls: Feminism, postfeminism, authenticity and gendered performance in contemporary television, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan
• Mediated and Mediating Feminisms: Periodical Culture from Suffrage to Second Wave, Bazin, V., Waters, M. May 2017, In: Women: A Cultural Review
• ‘Yours in Struggle’: Bad Feelings and Revolutionary Politics in Spare Rib, Waters, M. May 2017, In: Women: A Cultural Review

• Amy Thorpe Emerging Feminisms: Gender, Female Identity and Visual Culture in the Common Cause, 1909-1920 Start Date: 01/10/2021
• Amy Thorpe Emerging Feminisms: Gender, Female Identity and Visual Culture in the Common Cause, 1909-1920 Start Date: 01/10/2021 End Date: 17/10/2025

• English Literature PhD January 30 2006
• English Literature MA October 31 2002
• Fellow (FHEA) Higher Education Academy (HEA) 2015