Melanie Waters

Melanie Waters is a Lecturer in English Literature at Northumbria University, where she has served since 2008. She specializes in feminist literary criticism, focusing on the intersection of feminism, form, and politics in 20th-century literature and culture. Her research examines feminist periodicals' role in shaping activist discourse and subjectivity, particularly through the AHRC-funded project Liberating Histories: Women's Movement Magazines, Media Activism and Periodical Pedagogies (2022–2025). She holds a PhD from Newcastle University (2006) and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2015).

Her work investigates temporality in feminist texts and media, analyzing publications like Ms., Spare Rib, and Just Seventeen. She co-authored Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (2014) and is currently co-writing Feminist Periodicals and the UK Women's Movement: Networks of Feeling Since 1968 with Edinburgh University Press. She supervises doctoral student Amy Thorpe on early 20th-century feminist visual culture.

Key research areas include confessional poetry, Doris Lessing's fiction, and the cultural politics of postfeminism. Her writing has appeared in journals like Textual Practice and Modern Fiction Studies, and she has contributed to public discourse through media features in The Times and USA Today.