In The Girls’ Room: Bedroom Culture and the Ephemeral Archive of the 1990s, I consider the centrality of teenage girls’ bedrooms to the formation of 1990s-era feminist periodical and visual cultures.

Both my current project, The Girls’ Room, and my research methods more broadly are deeply informed by my formative experiences in DIY and zinemaking communities. Growing up, I pounded out my own zine, Infinity Everywhere, from my bedroom floor on a blue Smith-Corona I’d rescued and fixed up from a local re-sell shop. Though my teenage bedroom and zine have both been lost to time, I still write from my bedroom every morning and find myself obsessively tracking down the ephemeral pieces of feminist periodical culture — from zines to comics to broadsides and everything in between —  in institutional archives, friend’s basements, punk houses, small press expos, and digital auctions. I rigorously apply a Do-It-Yourself mindset to my academic work: creating a theoretical language for feminist methodologies of research, collaboration and collation; constructing myself an archive of hard-to-find, out-of-print materials to work with; and building community around and through my own research projects.

Selections from my current project are forthcoming in collections from Palgrave Macmillan and Oxford University Press.