Members of the Network

Gaëlle Aeby is a research fellow at the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, University of Manchester.

Her main research interests lie in personal networks and kin and non-kin relationships, youth, life trajectories, critical life transitions and their rituals, as well as institutions and welfare state regimes framing personal life. She also has a strong interest in innovative research designs combining quantitative and qualitative methods. She is currently conducting a study on the recomposition of personal networks after an intimate relationship breakdown and separation rituals in the UK and in Switzerland “Overcoming separation: Separation rituals and the roles of friends and family.” Her publications include: Bonding and Bridging Social Capital in Step- and First-Time Families and the Issue of Family Boundaries (2014). Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships; Collecting family network data (2013). International Review of Sociology; Entrer and sortir des institution / Institutionen: Ein- und Austritte (2011). Tsantsa. Revue de la société suisse d’ethnologie, Les miroirs de l’adolescence : anthropologie du placement juvénile (2014), Lausanne: Antipodes

Nadje Al-Ali is Professor of Gender Studies in the Centre for Gender Studies, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Nadje has come to be interested in love academically (romantic love, friendship and love for one’s country) in the context of her work on women and gender in the Middle East, particularly with reference to Iraq. In the context of her research on war, invasion and occupation in Iraq, she has become interested in changing gender relations and ideologies, including ideas and practises around romantic love, marriage, love for one’s children as well as friendship. How do changing femininities and masculinities in the context of political transition, militarization and violence impact on love as imagined and practised? How does love amongst people relate to love for one’s country? What is the relationship between love and hate?Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives (Zed Books, 2009, co-edited with Nicola Pratt), Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books); New Approaches to Migration (ed., Routledge, 2002, with Khalid Koser); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) and Gender Writing – Writing Gender (The American University in Cairo Press, 1994) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her forthcoming publication is entitled We are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War (Syracuse University Press, co-edited with Deborah Al-Najjar).

Adriana García Andrade is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco in Mexico City.

Adriana’s research interests focus on how love has become a re-newed scientific object within the social sciences and within different multidisciplinary research. In particular, she is interested in making a comparison between the similarities and differences of specific scientific regions (i.e., Anglo-American, French, and Latin-American regions) regarding their use of theoretical approaches and methodologies in the understanding of scientific problems related to love. The main argument here is that the construction of those scientific love problems varies from one region to another.She is currently editing with Olga Sabido a book called Cuerpo y afectividad en la sociedad contemporánea (Body and Affectivity in Contemporary Society). Her latest publications include: 1) An analysis of how academic networks influence the way research objects are constructed. Here she uses the case of love and the body). 2) A study of how scientific journal articles serve as ‘normalizing discourses’ in the Foucauldian sense. In this paper Adriana and co-author Priscila Cedillo look at the impact those articles have on the way love is thought of and practiced. 3) A survey of the way in which 200 top-ranked academic journals have addressed the subject of love for the past twenty years. More specifically, the survey looks at types of journals and types of disciplines and how the latter ‘borrow’ inputs from each other in order to explain the subject of love. This paper is also co-authored with Cedillo.

Meg-John Barker is a writer and writing mentor, based in Brighton (UK).
Their publications include Queer: A Graphic History (with Julia Scheele), How To Understand Your Gender (with Alex Iantaffi), Enjoy Sex (How, When, and IF You Want To) (with Justin Hancock), Rewriting the Rules, The Psychology of Sex, and The Secrets of Enduring Love (with Jacqui Gabb). They have also written numerous books, articles, chapters, and reports for scholars and counsellors, drawing on their own research and therapeutic practice. In particular they have focused their academic-activist work on the topics of bisexuality, open non-monogamy, sadomasochism, non-binary gender, and Buddhist mindfulness. Barker was an academic psychologist and therapist for many years before focusing on writing full time. They co-founded the journal Psychology & Sexuality and the activist-research organisation BiUK, through which they published The Bisexuality Report. They have advised many organisations, therapeutic bodies, and governmental departments on matters relating to gender, sexual, and relationship diversity (GSRD). They are also involved in facilitating many public events on sexuality and relationships, including Sense about Sex and Critical Sexology. Nowadays they work as a full-time writer and also a one-to-one writing mentor with clients. They offer talks and training on GSRD, self-care, writing, and other topics. They blog and podcast about all these topics on rewriting-the-rules.com and megjohnandjustin.com.

Ann Brooks is a Visiting Professor at the Australian Catholic University, Institute of Religion, Politics and Society, in Sydney in 2018-19. [read more]Ann is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and has been an Associate Investigator and International Investigator on the Australia Research Council (ARC) funded Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 2011-2018. Ann has held positions as Professor of Sociology at Bournemouth University and Head of School of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Adelaide. She has held research fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Ann has published widely in the area of emotions, love and intimacy and feminism and gender. Her latest books are: Genealogies of Emotions, Intimacy and Desire: Theories of Changes in Emotional Regimes from Medieval Society to Late Modernity (Routledge, 2017), Women Politics and the Public Sphere (Policy Press/Bristol University Press, 2019) and Love and Intimacy in Contemporary Society: Love in an International Context (Routledge, 2019)

Amy Burge is a lecturer in Popular Fiction in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham.

Her work focuses on popular genres, in particular romance, with a focus on intersectional readings and approaches. She is currently researching the connections between migration, intimacy, and popular fiction. Her first monograph, Representing Difference in Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance (2016), outlined the phenomenon of the sheikh romance in the twentieth and twenty-first century and its provocative connection with fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Orientalist Middle English romance. She has published chapters and articles on a range of topics related to gender and popular fiction, including: the uses of history in historical popular romance fiction (Palgrave, 2012); sexualisation in medieval and modern sex and relationship advice for young women (Journal of Gender Studies, 2018); literary depictions of virginity testing (University of Regina Press, 2016); popular fiction and migration (IRiS Working Paper Series, 2020); class and wealth in popular romance fiction (Routledge, 2020); materiality and imperialism in medieval romance (Medieval Feminist Forum, 2020); a review essay on The Sheik (Journal of Popular Romance Studies, 2020) and romance and chick lit published in the Middle East (Routledge, 2021). Amy was co-editor, with Michael Gratzke, of a special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) on ‘Critical Love Studies’ (2017) and has been Managing Editor of JPRS since September 2020. She is principal investigator for an AHRC-funded Research Network on Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction (2021-2023). Amy teaches courses on popular fiction, gender, and race and is currently supervising a range of doctoral projects on popular romance, migration, and women’s writing.

Paul Cato is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought.

His research examines Black Americans’ contributions to the practice and theorization of love – particularly those of African American author James Baldwin. He is especially interested in conceptions of love found in cultural works and those that speak to the world’s political realities. His dissertation outlines the discourse of “active love” – a decades-long conversation on political love comprised of Baldwin’s discussions with several 20th-century American intellectuals. In addition to studying Baldwin, Paul has spent much time studying the definition, conceptualization, and expression of “black love,” as well as the work of Audre Lorde, Emanuel Levinas, and Plato. His research integrates several methodologies, including close reading, archival work, and cultural criticism. His interests in interrelatedness also extend into more practical fields of human sociality such as race relations, disability studies, and social justice.

Tatiana Chemi, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, Chair of Educational Innovation, where she works in the field of artistic/aesthetic learning and creative processes. She started her career as scholar investigating theatre, comedy and Absurdism (In the Beginning Was the Pun: Comedy and Humour in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre, 2013). From there she moved into post-dramatic, physical theatre and the intersection between theatre and education. She looked at creative partnerships in schools (The Art of Arts Integration, 2014), artistic creativity (with Borup and Hersted, Behind the Scenes of Artistic Creativity, 2015) and at artist-led learning in higher education (with Neilson, The Pedagogy of the Moment: Building Artistic Time-Spaces for critical-creative learning, 2022). More recently, she has been looking at theatre laboratories as material and affective places of/for education (A Theatre Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy and Creativity: Odin Teatret and Group Learning, 2018), study that led to the interest on the pedagogy of love and care (with Brattico, E., Fjorback, L. O., & Harmat, L. (Eds.) Arts and Mindfulness Education for Human Flourishing, 2022). In 2013, Aalborg University Press named her Author of the Year and in 2021 she was nominated Teacher of the Year. She is currently involved in a research project exploring theatre laboratories in nurse education (Holistic Learning of Lived and Imagined Experiences – HoLLIE Lab). She is founder and leader of the researchers’ group Arts-Based Methods and Performativity in Educational Research (AMPERE), with focus on the arts and/in social justice and communities. She is Visiting Associate Professor at University of Chester, UK (2021-2024) and visiting researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Jennifer Cooke is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. In her recently completed dissertation she examines the narrative composition of early old protagonists in romantic relationships from a queer perspective. She analyzes contemporary German novels. Based on research in the fields of sociology, cognitive science, and narratology she develops a model for the analysis of erotic love at the beginning of old age. Her pluralistic perspective on literature as a field for experimentation shows the opportunity of reshaping romantic relationships as well as sex, gender, and desire in early old age.

Ana J. Cuevas is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Literature and Communication at University of Colima, Mexico. Ana’s research focuses on the place of love in the formation of couples, the reasons for which people decide to split and how love imaginaries change after couple breakdown. Her latest research compares, from a three-generation approach, the love experiences of heterosexual men and women in two Mexican regions. Among the most important findings of this research are that love language used by most men and women is very consistent, that the main differences between them are in the cultural practices of love and the identification of emergent love cultural changes among the youngest and most educated men and women. She is currently co-editing with Sampson Blair the book Conjugal Trajectories: Relationship Beginnings, Change, and Dissolutions which forms part of the book series Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research published by Emerald Publishing. She is also to publish her book La Formación de Parejas: emociones, cercanía de atributos y brechas de edad (The formation of couples: emotions, homogamy and age-discrepancy) edited by the University of Guadalajara. Her latest publications include: 1) Age homogamy and heterogamy in three generation of men and women in Mexico where she analyses the gender inequalities and weak role of love in the formation of couples. 2) The reasons for which young and medium adults use Tinder. The study sheds light on users’ longing for romantic partners and the use of the application to make friends, have casual sex and leisure. 3) Conjugality and intimacy in Latin America where she offers a thorough revision of the literature of conjugality and intimacy in this region. 4) Intimacy and couple relationships where she and a group of colleagues propose a theoretical discussion on intimacy and its links to conjugality, gender roles, care, sexuality and use of digital technology.

Lauren Edwards is a PhD student at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Lauren’s doctoral research project asks – can there be love without object or beloved? Love is often defined as a particular lover/beloved relation – love is the union of lover and beloved; love is the recognition of value in or bestowal of value upon the beloved by the lover; or love is the emotional response of the lover to the beloved. Definitions like these make the beloved essential to what love is; but is it? Drawing on feminist theory, analytic and continental philosophy, quantum physics, and neuroscience, I hope to argue that it is not; that there is a type of love without object, an intransitive love, and that our theories of what love is must be re-thought.

Jennifer Evans is Associate Professor of History and Graduate Chair at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada.
She teaches a variety of courses in 20th and 21st century German history with interests in the history of sexuality, visual culture, and social media. Her book, Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) explores the rebirth of the city’s various subcultures in the aftermath of World War II. She has written extensively about same-sex sexuality in Nazi and post-1945 Germany, and is currently editing a volume with Matt Cook (Birkbeck) entitled Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe Since 1945. Her current project explores the function of erotic photography as a claim to desire, personhood, and sexual freedom during and after the Sexual Revolution.

Ann Ferguson is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
As well as a scholar in feminist theory, gender, sexuality and political philosophy, she is also a long time feminist activist on issues of peace, social justice, and transnational solidarity. She has numerous published articles and book chapters in feminist philosophy and theory, and has published five books. Her most current book is an edited anthology of papers in Love Studies. It is co-edited with Anna Jónasdóttir and the title is Love: A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014). Her first two books in feminist theory develop her materialist feminist analysis that sexuality, affection, love and desire are molded in historically various systems of “sex/affective production” which also reproduce male domination. These books are Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Dominance (Pandora: Unwin Hyman, 1989) and Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution (Westview, 1991). Her latest papers and talks use instead the concept of the “affective economy”, a set of material practices that involves the exchange of affection and love in egalitarian or inegalitarian ways. She is currently working on issues of gender justice, solidarity vs. couple love, and radical bio-power (love as a political force). She is also working on a critical analysis of the material feminism of Barad, Braidotti, Grosz, and Paredes as they develop a metaphysics of body and affects, particularly love and solidarity, that can explain male domination and feminist resistance.

Jacqui Gabb is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at The Open University.
Jacqui has been interested in researching families and personal relationships for many years and has completed several empirical studies in this area. Her work explored the intersections of the public and the private in shaping how we live and understand relationships, including how we make sense of and experience love, and, more widely, the structures of feeling. Her empirical studies have centred on intimacy and sexuality in same-sex and heterosexual relationships, focusing attention on how the adult couple and parent–child relationships are spatially and temporally located in households. Her work has also been concerned with developing methodological approaches to research the multidimensionality of personal relationships including pioneering the emotion map method. Her most recent study is Enduring Love? Couple relationships in the 21st century. This psycho-social mixed methods study on long-term adult couple relationships is concerned with how meanings and experiences of ‘togetherness’ are shaped by gender, generation and the absence/presence of children. We are exploring how love has been conceptualized as a set of relational, practical activities and discourses and the ways in which these can be distinguished from, or interwoven with, other emotions such as trust, commitment and care. For more information on the project or to take part in the study, please visit our website: www.enduringlove.co.uk Her publications include Researching Intimacy in Families (2008, Palgrave Macmillan); Managing public–private displays of father–child intimacy and child nudity in families, Sociology, (forthcoming); ‘Family Lives and Relational Living: Taking Account of Otherness’ Sociological Research Online, Vol. 16 (4), 2011; ‘Researching Family Relationships: A Qualitative Mixed Methods Approach’, Methodological Innovations Online, Vol. 4(2), 2009; Lesbian M/Otherhood: Strategies of Familial-linguistic Management in Lesbian Parent Families’, Sociology, Vol. 39(4), 2005, pp.385-603; ‘”I Could Eat My Baby to Bits”. Passion and Desire in Lesbian Mother-Children Love’, Gender, Place Culture, Vol. 11(3), 2004, pp.399-415; ‘Querying the Discourses of Love: An Analysis of Contemporary Patterns of Love and the Stratification of Intimacy’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 8(3), 2001, pp.313-28 as well as book chapters and other journal articles.

María-Isabel González-Cruz is Full Professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where she teaches Pragmatics.

She has published widely on the Anglo-Canarian socio-cultural and linguistic contact, as one of her main research interests is the study of the long English bibliography on the Canaries, resulting from the intense Anglo-Canarian relationships throughout history. She came to be interested in popular romance fiction in the context of her search for all types of English writing on the Canaries. In addition to several books, she has published a number of articles and book chapters on various issues related to Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, ELT, Anglicisms and Hispanicisms in English, as well as linguistic approaches to romance fiction. Author of the university textbook Pragmatics: A Reader and Workbook (2013), she has also edited Lengua, sociedad y cultura: estudios interdisciplinares (2006), co-authored Anglicismos en el habla juvenil de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2009) and more recently La presencia del inglés en la publicidad televisiva española, 2013-2015 (Ed. Síntesis, 2015) and English for Physiotherapists: A Coursebook for Spanish Students, ULPGC, 2015). 

Michael Gratzke is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Dundee, UK.

His research revolves around depictions of (male) subjectivity in literature, film and on the Internet. He is particularly interested in the aesthetic representation of extreme experiences and altered states of mind. He has written a monograph on masochism (Liebesschmerz und Textlust, 2000) and one on heroic self-sacrifice (Blut und Feuer, 2011). He has published on representations of romantic love in recent German-, Finnish- and English-language narrative fiction, and is the author of Love is what people say it is: Performativity and Narrativity in Critical Love Studies.

Renata Grossi a lecturer in law at the University of Technology in Sidney, Australia. [read more]Renata Grossi is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with an interest in the area of law and love. In 2011 she was awarded her PhD which was entitled ‘The (in)visibility of romantic love in the legal discourse of modern Australian marriage’ now published as Looking for love in the legal discourse of marriage (2014 ANU Press).

In November 2013 she co-convened (with A/Prof David West) The Radicalism of Romantic Love: Critical Perspectives. A selection of papers from this conference is now published under that title by Routledge (2017). In December 2014 she co-convened (with Joshua Neoh) a colloquium on Law and Love. A selection of papers from this colloquium is now published as a special edition of Law in Context (2016).

In all of her publications Renata is interested in the relationship of law and emotion in both practical and theoretical ways. She is currently working on projects which question the ways that law and emotion scholarship challenge the ways we understand law in theory.

Lena Gunnarsson is a researcher in Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden.

Her recently completed dissertation deals theoretically with the way male power is constituted through practices of love, care and eroticism. She draws specifically on Anna G. Jónasdóttir’s radical feminist-historical materialist theory of ‘love power’. A major aspect of her reasearch is also a meta-theoretical engagement with Critical Realism as a way of countering the strong poststructuralist tendencies within contemporary feminist theory.

Christopher Hartney is a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney.

He studies modern myth and new religions particularly those of East Asia and with a notable mania for Vietnam. He has a doctorate on and has published extensively about the origins and development of Caodaism, which since 1926 has been Vietnam’s largest indigenous religion. Chris has additional qualifications in Performance Studies, Latin, and is presently studying for a Masters in Education (University of Technology Sydney). In 2011 he was awarded an Australian Research Council Grant to investigate the interface of religion, culture and politics, and this has led him to examine the dogmatic place of “love” as a binding force between patriotism, popular ideals of romance, and late-captialist ideals of life meaning. He is president of the Sydney Society for Literature and Aesthetics, Australian national delegate to the International Congress of Aesthetics, and he co-edits both the Journal for Religious History, and the Journal for Literature and Aesthetics. With suspicions that Simon May is right and that love has become our new religion, Chris staged a one day international symposium in November of 2012 “A Love Supreme: Love and Ultimacy in the 21st Century.”

Jenny van Hooff is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Her research interests are couples, sexual practices, love, commitment, monogamy/non-monogamy and emotional/domestic labour and she is the author of Modern Couples: Continuity and Change in Heterosexual Relationships (2013). She is currently researching heterosexual women’s intimate and sexual lives as well as writing about male sexual dominance in popular romantic and erotic fiction.

Saara Jäntti is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Languages at the University of Jyväskylä.

Her post doc research builds on the two main themes, home and madness, established in her PhD on the meanings of home in women’s madness narratives (Bringing Madness Home. The Multiple Meanings of Home in Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities, 2012). Her new research project on home focuses on homing blogs, i.e. weblogs narrating everyday life, often from the view point of a heterosexual mother. What is interesting in these blogs is the construction of intimacy in the public space of the Internet, and the ethics, ideologies and technologies involved. In regard to madness and love, she is interested in exploring the interplay and construction of the notions of love, self and authenticity in the narratives of the users of psycho-pharmaceutical drugs. Her multidisciplinary research interests thus include gender, space, and qualitative research in mental health, madness narratives, and theories on home.

Olu Jenzen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Brighton.

Her research ranges across a variety of overlapping fields of inquiry within Media and Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Literature. She has strong research interests in twentieth century and contemporary writing and popular culture generally but in the politics of literary form and themes and debates on the politics of sexualities in particular. She has written on the sexual politics of the literary fantastic; the queer uncanny and queer methodology as well as articles on the works of Jeanette Winterson and Michael Cunningham. She is currently co-editing a special issue of The Journal of Lesbian Studies (Routledge) as well as The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures (forthcoming 2013) which relates to her research interests in non-normative epistemologies. Together with colleagues from the universities of Brighton and Sussex she is involved in organising events for the Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Research Network (BSSN) and she is also part of the committee for the University of Brighton’s LGBTQ Lives Research Hub.

Emily Jeremiah is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Gender Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Emily Jeremiah’s research interests include literature, gender, ethics, mothering, and transnationalism. She is the author of Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and Ethics in Women’s Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s (Maney/MHRA, 2003), Nomadic Ethics in Contemporary Women’s Writing in German: Strange Subjects (Camden House, 2012) and Willful Girls: Gender and Agency in Contemporary Anglo-American and German Fiction (Camden House 2018). She is co-editor, with Frauke Matthes, of Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture (Edinburgh German Yearbook 7 2013) and, with Gill Rye, Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Giorgio, and Abigail Lee Six, of Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (Routledge, 2017). Emily is also a prize-winning translator of Finnish poetry and fiction, and the author of two novellas, Blue Moments (Valley Press, 2020) and An Approach to Black (Reflex Press, forthcoming 2021).

Bronach Kane is Lecturer in Medieval History in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University.

Her research interests lie in perceptions and practices associated with love, courtship and desire in medieval England. She co-edited Women, Agency and the Law, 1300-1700 (London, 2013), with Fiona Williamson, and is finishing a monograph project entitled, Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women and Testimony in the Church Courts, c.1200-1500. She has written widely on gender and the law, and published chapters and articles dealing with courtship, marriage and sexuality in thirteenth to fifteenth-century England. Her next book-length project focuses on love, happiness, and desire before and after marriage in this same period. She welcomes contact from other participants working in similar areas in other periods and fields.

Mine Özyurt Kiliç is an Associate Professor of English Literature at ASBÜ, Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey.

Her research focuses on contemporary women’s writing with special interest in the way women re-visit and change/challenge established genres. She is the author of Gender-Bending Fantasies in Women’s Writing which investigates the function of the fantastic in the works of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson (VDM, 2009). She also co-edited a volume of essays Winterson Narrating Time and Space (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). She contributed to ABES Contemporary Literature section reviewing works on Pat Barker, Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter. Her most recent work is a book chapter “‘Cradling an axe like a baby’: Angela Carter’s Lulu” which studies Carter’s rewriting of Frank Wedekind’s play and her interpretation of the femme fatale (in Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, eds. Andermahr and Phillips, Continuum 2012). Her monograph studying Maggie Gee’s fiction Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England has been published with Continuum in 2012.

Gözde Kılıç is a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute, Italy 

Gözde received her PhD in Cultural Studies from Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. Her current work engages with a cultural and literary history of lovesickness in early twentieth century Turkey. It explores how Turkish views of love changed during modernization when love was brought into the domain of scientific and civilizational discourse, treated as a measurable and analytical concept. More specifically, it examines how the preeminence of biological and materialist definitions of love in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Turkey displaced earlier mystical and quasi-divine definitions, turning love into a socio-medical issue, and ultimately a vehicle for political agendas. 

Leena Kurvet-Käosaar is Associate Professor of Literary Theory at the Institute of Cultural Research and the Arts at the University of Tartu and Senior Researcher at the Archives of Cultural History, Estonian Literary Museum.

Her current research interests focus on life writing studies and feminist theory, the framework of trauma and Baltic women’s experience of the experience of the repressions of the Soviet regime, feminist theories of affectivity and corporeality and the study of women’s experience of modernity. Her work in the field has been published in Prose Studies, Journal of Baltic Studies, Biography and a number of edited volumes. She is the author of Embodied Subjectivity in the Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Aino Kallas and Anais Nin (2006), the editor (with Lea Rojola) of Aino Kallas. Negotiations with Modernity (2011).

Estella C. Kuchta is the author of Finding the Daydreamer, a historical Canadian tale of survival and love.

Her research at The University of British Columbia examined the ecocritical dimensions of love stories in Canadian fiction. Her current research at Simon Fraser University explores relational ontology from an ecological perspective and the ways contemporary North American culture fractures love relationships to land and more-than-humans. Other recent work has analyzed the impact of romance novels on American teen relational capacity. Collectively, these projects make inquiries about the status and health of contemporary love in late-capitalist, eco-impaired U.S. and Canada and map the cultural conditions that impact individuals’ capacity for love.

Claire Langhamer is Senior Lecturer in History in the Department of History at the University of Sussex.

She began her career researching women’s leisure across the life cycle using oral history. This work was published as Women’s Leisure in England, 1920-1960 (2000). Since then she has published on social and domestic lives in mid-century Britain often making use of materials gathered by Mass Observation. She now works within the history of emotion making particular use of evidence that facilitate the analysis of ordinary affective worlds. A new book, Everyday Love will be published in 2013 and examines romantic love in the middle decades of the twentieth century. She co-organised a recent ESRC funded research seminar series on Women in the 1950s, is co-editor of Twentieth Century British History and on the editorial boards of Women’s History Review and History of the Family.

Haiyan Lee is associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University.

She was educated at Beijing University, the University of Chicago, and Cornell University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 (2007), which won the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize (post-1900 China) from the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the guest-editor of “Taking It to Heart: Emotion, Modernity, Asia,” a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique (2008). Her scholarly articles have appeared in Telos, PMLA, Public Culture, Positions, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, and elsewhere. She recently completed a new book entitled The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination.

Kirsty Liddiard is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield.

Kaarina Määttä is the Professor of Educational Psychology and Vice-rector of the University of Lapland, Finland.

Professor Kaarina Määttä has studied human relationships and love and its various forms based on thousands of Finnish people’s experiences for over 15 years. She has become famous and recognized in Finland due to numerous television and media appearances. She is a popular lecturer and has been given the courtesy title “Love Professor”. She has written numerous books about the theme in Finnish. Since that, Määttä has expanded her analysis on various sides of love together with Dr. Satu Uusiautti both in English “The Many Faces of Love” (2013, Sense Publishers) and in Finnish “Rakkaus: Tunteita, taitoja, tekoja [Love: Emotions, Skills, Actions]” (2014, Kirjapaja).

Ania Malinowska is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland and a fromer Senior Fulbright Fellow at the New School of Social Research in New York, USA.

Ania is a coeditor of (with Karolina Lebek) Materiality and Popular Culture. The Popular Life of Things (Routledge 2017), (with Michael Gratzke) The Materiality of Love. Essays of Affection and Cultural Practice (Routledge 2018), and (with Toby Miller) “Media and Emotions. The New Frontiers of Affect in Digital Culture” (a special issue of Open Cultural Studies, 2017). She has authored many papers and chapters in cultural and media studies with regard to love, social norms, codes of feelings and technology. She is currently working on a monograph Love in Contemporary Technoculture (under contract with CUP) and an edited collection Data Dating (under contract with Intellect).

Dr Fiona Martinez is an Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University.

Her PhD research uses Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of authentic love, as outlined in The Second Sex (1949), to explore representations of romantic love as a feminist endeavour in the work of a number of contemporary women writers.

Christian Maurer is SNSF research professor in philosophy at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland).

Christian mainly works on moral and political philosophy, from both historical and systematic perspectives. Much of his work is on the emotions and passions, and when it comes to love, he is interested in comparing the sometimes very different philosophical approaches to this phenomenon. Amongst other things, he is co-editor of “Love and Its Objects” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), the author of “Self-love, Egoism and the Selfish Hypothesis: Key Debates from Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy” (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and the co-editor and co-translator of Shaftesbury’s “Pathologia – A Theory of the Passions” (History of European Ideas 2/2013).

Simon May is visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London.

His books include Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), Love: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), The Power of Cute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), a collection of his own aphorisms entitled Thinking Aloud (London: Alma Books, 2009), and Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on “Morality” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). He has written opinion pieces for the Financial Times and The Washington Post, among other newspapers, and his work has been translated into ten languages.

Rimple Mehta is an Assistant Professor at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences.

Previously she was an Assistant Professor at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. She studied Sociology, Social Work and Women’s Studies and has written on gender, borders, sexuality and prisons, especially criminalization of mobility and Bangladeshi women in Indian prisons. Her paper titled “So Many Ways to Love You/Self: Negotiating Love in a Prison” won the 2013 Enloe Award. She has worked with organisations such as Swayam and networks such as Maitree against violence on women in West Bengal, as well as with women prisoners in Mumbai, Kolkata and The Netherlands. Her book ‘Women, Mobility and Incarceration: Love and Recasting of Self Across the Bangladesh-India Border’ was published by Routledge in August 2018.

Tony Milligan is senior researcher in the Philosophy of Ethics with the Cosmological Visionaries project, based out of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London.

The key theme uniting his areas of research is otherness (other people, creatures, and places).  Publications include Pravda v době populismu/Truth in a Time of Populism (2019); the co-edited white paper on Astrobiology and Society in Europe (2018); the co-edited volume The Ethics of Space Exploration (2016); The Next Democracy? The Possibility of Popular Control (London: Roman and Littlefield, 2016); Animal Ethics: the Basics, (2015, 2020 Spanish edition); Nobody Owns the Moon: The Ethics of Space Exploitation (2015); the co-edited volume Love and its Objects (2014); Civil Disobedience: Protest, Justification and the Law (2013; Indian market edition 2017); Love (2011); Beyond Animal Rights: Food, Pets and Ethics (2010, 2019 Korean edition). He is currently finishing a monograph on The Ethics of Political Dissent, for Routledge, due for release in 2021, emphasizing political compassion and our shared humanity as a way of eroding conceptions of politics based around a friend-enemy distinction.

F. Fiona Moolla is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Against a broader interest in African and Postcolonial literature and culture, Fiona recently has focused her attention on personal relationships, especially romantic love in African modes of expression. African discourses on eros suggest the following nodes for study, all of which are currently being explored by the researcher – the preoccupation with romantic love over kinship relationships in a transition to modernity, the nexus of romantic love and marriage, romance as national and transnational allegory, African popular romance, and romance and materialism. Her publications include:

“Time, Space, Love in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace” in The Culture Chromosome: Time, Space and Transculturality in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction edited by Asis De and Alessandro Vescovi, Brill, 1 November 2021.  

“Her Heart Lies at the Feet of the Mother: Transformations of the Romance Plot in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret.” The African Journal of Gender and Religion, Vol 27, No 2.   

Adi Moreno is a PhD student in the Sociology department at the University of Manchester, UK.

Her doctoral research project investigates family relationalities that develop in the context of gay men who become fathers through surrogacy. These parents engage in an international reproduction trade, involving egg donors, surrogates, fertility clinics, agents and various state actors. A major focus of the research is the maintenance of “proper affect” between the participants in the reproduction process – fathers, egg-donors, surrogates and children within these the technical-commercial settings for building new families.

Alejandra Moreno-Álavrez holds a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of Oviedo.

Alejandra has been a research fellow at Rutgers University, Cornell University and the University of Leeds, among others. Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Oviedo, her teaching and research are centered in Literatures in English Language and Feminist and Postcolonial Theory. She is the author of Lenguajes comestibles: Anorexia, bulimia y su descodificación en la ficción de Margaret Atwood y Fay Weldon (Edicions UIB); El lenguaje trasgresor de las Ciborgs Literarias (ArCiBel Editores) and Ambai: Un movimiento, una carpeta, algunas lágrimas / A movement, a folder, some tears (KRK, 2011). She is a member of the Research Project “The Politics, Aesthetics and Marketing of Literary Formulae in Popular Women’s Fiction: History, Exoticism and Romance” (HER: http://her.uib.es/research-team/) where she focuses on the aesthetics and marketability of historical romances set in India, and the boom of popular romantic novels in India, particularly through the Harlequin Mills and Boon Imprint. morenoalejandra@uniovi.es

Alex J. Nelsonis an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indianapolis, USA.

Alex is a cultural anthropologist conducting ethnographic research on romantic love in South Korea. His work explores recent changes in Koreans’ expectations of love and romantic relationships and their implications for declining marriage and fertility rates. He is currently analyzing the portrayal of love in Korean television dramas and has written on the ethnology of romantic love.

Joshua Neoh is a Lecturer in Law at the Australian National University.

His current research examines the question of what lies at the foundation of a political community – law or love. His scholarship draws on biblical narratives about law and love in addition to contemporary jurisprudential writings on this topic. He has published in various interdisciplinary law journals, including Law, Culture and the Humanities, the Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy, and the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion. He received his Bachelor of Laws from the Australian National University and his Master of Laws from Yale Law School.

Jane O’Grady teaches at the London School of Philosophy (she was one of its seven founders), is a Visiting Lecturer in the Social Sciences Department at City University, and writes philosophers’ obituaries for the Guardian.

She co-edited A Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations (Blackwell, 1992) with A. J. Ayer, did 16 entries for the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and wrote introductions to Mill’s On Liberty and The Subjection of Women and to Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Symposium (Wordsworth). She writes reviews and articles for various newspapers and web sites.

Recently, she has been researching and writing a book about romantic love – philosophical but also bringing in literature (particularly Courtly Love, Shakespeare and Donne), anthropology, sociology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. In the summer term she gave a ten-week course in the Philosophy of Love at the Freud Museum, and this term will be giving one for the London School of Philosophy.

Her interests are — how far love is spontaneous and involuntary, as opposed to deliberate and enacted (this is obviously a different question in different areas – biological, social, individual, cultural). Also in what it could mean to ‘love x for him/herself’, as opposed to loving a fantasy or a projection or a set of properties.

Jools Page is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education (ECE) at the University of Brighton and leads the Children, Young People’s Voice and Education Research and Enterprise group in the School of Education.

Jools’ research interest centres around attachment-based relationships between adults and children under three years of age in group day care provision and is known for conceptualising the term ‘Professional Love’ (Page, 2011, 2018). Jools’ research examines the discourse on intimacy, care and Professional Love within the context of contemporary international debates on adult-child pedagogical relationships in the early years. She is currently working with colleagues in Australia, researching the presence or absence of ‘Professional Love’ between caregivers and babies from the infant toddler perspective. She is also collaborating with colleagues, Martin Purcell and James Reid at the University of Huddersfield to interrogate the boundaries of love and professionalism within the context of childhood studies and youth.

Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam is Associate Professor of Art History, Aarhus University, Denmark.

She is PhD in Art History and MA in comparative literature and sociology and has studied at Aarhus University, University College London, Freie Universität (Berlin) and École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales (Paris). Her publications and research interests include sexuality studies, avant-garde art and theory, especially surrealism, and love letters. Since 2013 leader of the research unit ‘Sexuality Studies’ at Faculty of Arts, University of Aarhus, a unit that also comprises love studies. Spring 2015 KIASH visiting expert of Sexuality Studies, University of Kent, UK. Member of executive committee for European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) 2015-. Member of supervisory board for Centre for Avant-garde Studies, Iceland University 2012-. Board member Kunsthal Aarhus 2013-. Editor with Jacob Wamberg of Art, Technology and Nature, Ashgate 2015 and with Benedikt Hjartarson and Laura Schultz of A Cultural History of The Avant-garde in the Nordic Countries 1975-2000, vol. IV, Rodopi 2016.

Enrico Palma is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Catania in Sciences of Interpretation 

His research is dedicated to a philosophical project on À la recherche du temps perdu. He aims to show the Proustian conception of writing, seen as an existential activity by which human life can be redeemed from the waste of time and trasformed into the pure form of literature. A large part of his activity is also focused on the phenomenology of love in Proustian thought. For the French writer, the dynamic of love is an idealisation of the object and a product of lover’s imagination. The topic is treated in his paper The Elevation of Love. An Analogy in Proust and Caravaggio between imagination and philosophy. The theme of love was also discussed in other authors, such as Oscar Wilde (with two essays on De Profundis and the tragic consequences of love’s power) and the Italian poet Mario Luzi (an essay dedicated to the poem Lungo il fiume). His research fields are theoretical philosophy, hermeneutics and literature, with interests in Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cesare Pavese, Pierre Hadot and Emil Cioran. 

Jo Parsons is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Falmouth University.

Jo is originally a Victorian Literature specialist with interests in masculinity, the body, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Sensation Fiction, but now she is now leading Falmouth University’s move into the area of Erotica and Romantic Fictions and is currently working on a new project on popular women’s writing from 1950–the present day, with a particular focus on the Bonkbuster. Her research, both Victorian and contemporary, is grounded in gender and cultural studies. Jo is a co-editor (with Ruth Heholt) of both the Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture and Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures book series with Edinburgh University Press, as well as assistant editor of Revenant. Jo is currently editing a new collection entitled: Bonkbuster! Sex and Popular Romance from the 1950s to the Present Day.

Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University (UK)

Since 2015, Lynne has also been Director for the Humanities at Lancaster’s  Centre for Mobilities Studies [CeMoRe – (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/cemore/].  Her early work focused on feminist literary and cultural theory, and this included  a particular interest in theories of romantic love.  Her book publications in this field include the edited collections (with Jackie Stacey) Romance Revisited (1995) (and with Gina Wisker) Fatal Attractions:Re-scripting Romance in Contemporary Literature and Film (1997) and the monograph, Romance Writing (2007).  More recently, she has published several  chapters and articles on romance and repetition including ‘Romance, Trauma, Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love’ in Trauma and Romance   in British Fiction, eds. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega (2013) and ‘Love’s Schema and Correction: A Queer Twist on a General Principle’, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, 5.2. (2016). From 2006-10 she was PI on the AHRC-funded “Moving Manchester: How migration has informed writing in Greater Manchester 1960-present” and since 2012, her work has increasingly been focused in the field of mobilities studies through her involvement in Lancaster’s Centre for Mobilities Research [CeMoRe]). Her first publications in this field were principally on the cognitive and affective dimensions of driving and her book, Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness, was published in 2016. More recently, however, she has been working on projects which bring together her interest in the discourse of  love and the practice of mobility, including the monograph Mobility, Memory and the Lifecourse in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture (2019) which explores the role of mobilities of different kinds in the generation and sustenance of  intimate relationships. Two related articles which LOVE-RESEARCH members might also be interested in are “Walking Out: The Mobilities of Love” (Mobilities, 13.6, 2018) and “Trackless Mourning: The Mobilities of Love and Loss”. (cultural geographies, 26.2, 2019).

Véronique Pin-Fat is Senior Lecturer in international politics at the University of Manchester and the director of the Manchester Love Research Network.

Her research interests revolve around the use of ordinary language philosophy to grammatically read ethics, universality and humanity in global politics. She is the author of Universality, Ethics and International Relations (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor with Jenny Edkins and Michael J. Shapiro of Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (Routledge, 2004). Véronique is currently researching the avoidance of love in International Relations.

Jennifer Pinkerton lives in Canberra and recently completed her Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney.

Her thesis is titled Heartlands: Young Love and Sex in Modern Australia, a sociological/creative non-fiction account of love among Millennials. She is a project officer, and a former lecturer in writing, media and communication at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. Jennifer also works as a freelance writer and photographer. Her most recent documentary photographic exhibition Love Notes explores long-term love among older Australians (including those in non-traditional relationships). Her writing is published in inflight magazines, as well the UK editions of the Guardian the Telegraph, and various Australian travel and lifestyle magazines. She has appeared on ABC radio several times to share her love research and insights.

Angela Platt is Lecturer in Liberal Arts, Course Lead in English Literature and Subject Lead in Student Experience at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.

Angela’s research explores the intersection between emotions, religion, and the family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in examining how belief and familial experience reciprocally influence one another. Whilst she has examined a variety of emotions, her research centres around love as a catalyst for numerous other emotions – such as pain, nostalgia, hope, happiness, belonging, fear, and desire. She currently has three publications on love – an article which examines love and discipline in Baptist religious practice, an article examining pain as an indicator of love for nineteenth century dissenters, and a forthcoming book chapter on love and the divine in the Cultural History of Love series.

Martin Purcell is a Lecturer in Community Education in the School of Education & Social Work at the University of Dundee.

Martin has worked for over thirty years in community development and youth work, employed in both the voluntary and statutory sectors to support various initiatives in diverse communities in Wales, Scotland and England. Alongside his community work practice, Martin has worked in higher education for nearly 20 years, initially as a contract researcher (conducting evaluations of government-funded programmes, including the New Deal for Communities, the Children’s Fund and the Youth Contract), and more recently as a lecturer in Youth & Community Work and Community Education. Martin’s involvement in community work continues: as a Trustee of two local charities supporting youth work provision and promoting the mental and emotional wellbeing of children and young people in West Yorkshire; and volunteering with a number of local groups.

Martin’s research into the translation of professional (community development) values into practice raised more questions than it answered, particularly in relation to ‘how’ practitioners enact some of the more ethereal aspirations of the profession. The work of Paulo Freire underpins much of the teaching of community education practice, and Martin is keen to explore with practitioners working in a range of contexts how they view Freire’s assertion that ‘education’ in all its forms is an ‘act of love’; and how they enact this. Martin continues to be involved in conversations with community development practitioners and others supporting children and young people – in schools, youth work settings and offering mental health services – exploring their perception of the importance of ‘love’ as an element of their professional relationships with the people with whom they work. This work draws on Jools Page’s concept of ‘professional love’ in the early years, exploring the extent to which it can be applied in work with older children and young people and adults.  Martin has published widely on the findings of his research, including collaborations with Jools Page and others; he is currently developing relationships with researchers based in countries across the globe, looking to draw on practice examples from elsewhere to shape an inform UK practice.

Susan Quilliam writes, trains, consults, coaches and broadcasts on the themes of love and sexuality. She is passionate about helping people have the best relationships they can possibly have.

Susan’s field of interest and expertise is intimate relationships; within this field she was once described by a colleague as having “a number of arrows to her bow”. As well as coaching clients face to face on relationship issues, she is currently advice columnist for Woman magazine.

Susan has written 22 books published in 33 countries and 24 languages, including an ‘extension and reinvention’ of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (Octopus 2008), commissioned by the original publisher and with the approval of Dr Comfort’s family. Her other books include two for Relate – Stop Arguing Start Talking (Vermilion 1999), and The Relate Guide to Staying Together (Vermilion 1996) – as well as How to Choose a Partner (PanMacmillan 2016) which is based on the relationship course she co-wrote for the global self-development organisation The School of Life.

Susan’s academic involvement focusses on how improving relationships can improve well-being. She currently serves on the Council for Sexuality and Sexual Health of the Royal Society of Medicine and past projects have included writing the Consumer Correspondent Column for the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health and acting as consultant to the Enduring Love project at the Open University. She also delivers training to counsellors and coaches, most recently for Relate and Relationships Scotland.

Susan was named one of the Family Planning Association’s 21st Century Achievers, has been nominated for the Our Bodies Ourselves Health Hero Award and is an Ambassador for Relate Cambridge. She is a Professional Associate of the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists and an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Medicine. Since 2009 she has been a Patron of the Outsiders charity which supports sexual fulfilment for the less-abled.

Jordi Roca Girona is Full Professor of Social Anthropology at the Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona (Spain).

Since 2003 he has been teaching a pioneering subject in the Spanish university on “Sex, Gender and Love” in bachelor’s, master’s, and postgraduate courses.

His research focuses on gender, sexuality, and love studies, as well as on methodological issues and practices related to biographical memory, and ethnography. During the last 15 years he has directed 6 research projects on love migration and binational couples, conducting fieldwork in Ukraine, Mexico, and Brazil.

In 1993 he obtained the National Prize for Anthropology (Research Prize on Popular Arts and Traditions “Marqués de Lozoya”), awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the Spanish Government, for his doctoral research published afterwards under the title “De la pureza a la maternidad”, Ministerio de Cultura, 1996. His last two books are: “Rethinking Romantic Love” (with B. Enguix), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015 and “Amores lejanos” (with M. Allué), Bellaterra, 2016.

He has carried out research and teaching collaboration stays at various European, North American, and Latin American universities: in Mexico (UNAM, Iberoamericana, Ciesas, Quintana Roo), Brazil (Campinas, UF Rio de Janeiro, UF Rio Grande do Norte) and other countries (Berkeley, -USA-, ISCTE (Lisbon) and UTAD (Vila-real) -Portugal-, Pereira -Colombia-, amongst others).

Deborah Rodriguez is a doctoral student, as well as a part time Lecturer and Research Assistant in the Psychology Department at Middlesex University.

Deborah’s doctoral research explores changes in attachment behaviours across the transition to second-time parenthood in both partners of heterosexual couples, and examines the meaning that this experience has on the couples in understanding changes to their sense of self, to their relationship, and to their relationship networks in relation to their respective attachment behaviours. This longitudinal and prospective study uses multiple methods (psychosocial method, visual methods and participant diaries), generating multidimensional material, and the data is analysed using pluralistic qualitative mixed methods (e.g. narrative analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis and a psychosocial analysis). She is currently collecting and analysing the data of the first phase of the research.

Her publications so far include:
Elichaoff, F., Rodriguez, D., and Murphy, A. (2014). More than just a method: doctoral students’ perspectives on the place of qualitatively driven mixed methods. Qualitative Methods in Psychology Bulletin (17). pp. 17-22.
Frost, N. A., and Rodriguez, D. (in press). “And it was all my choice but it didn’t feel like a choice”: A re-examination of interpretation of data using a ‘rhetoric of choice’ lens. Women’s Studies International Forum. Special Issue: Choosing Mothering? The gendering of agency.
Hesse-Biber, S., Rodriguez, D., and Frost, N. A. (in press). Qualitatively-driven approaches to mixed method research. In S. Hesse-Biber and B. Johnson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of multi and mixed methods research inquiry. Oxford University Press.

Tania Rodriguez Salazar is Professor in the Department of Social Communication, at Universidad de Guadalajara, in México.

Tania’s research interests focus on representations of love, relationships and sexuality in social groups (mainly young people) and in some products of popular culture (Mexican soap operas and women magazines). Her current research project is oriented by the sociology of emotions and concerns the ways in which representations and practices of love and couple are constructed, reproduced and circulated throughout youth narratives in an urban context in Mexico. Tania’s publications include the book Las razones del matrimonio [Reasons for marriage] (2001, CUCSH-UDG) and the articles El amor en las ciencias sociales: cuatro visions teóricas [Love in Social Sciences: four theoretical visions] (2012); La sexualidad femenina en discursos de la prensa popular y la ficción televisiva [Female sexuality in discourses of popular press and tv fiction](2014, co-authored with Iliana Pérez); El amor y las nuevas tecnologías: experiencias de comunicación y conflicto [Love and new technologies: Communication and conflict experiences] (forthcoming 2016; co-authored with Zeyda Rodríguez).

Philip Roscoe is Reader in Management at the School of Management, University of St Andrews.

He is interested in markets and organising, and has studied such topics as online dating, organ transplants, non-professional investors and alternative currencies. Philip holds a PhD in management from Lancaster University, an MPhil in medieval Arabic thought from the University of Oxford, and a BA in theology from the University of Leeds. He has published in Accounting, Organization and Society, Business History, Organization and The Sociological Review. In 2011 he was one of the ten winners of the inaugural AHRC BBC Radio 3 ‘New Generation Thinkers’ scheme chosen from over a thousand applicants. His first book, I Spend Therefore I Am, was published in February 2014 in the UK and Canada. The German translation was shortlisted for Deutscher Wirtschaftsbuchpreis 2014, and the book will be published in Turkey and Korea in coming months.

Minna-Kristiina Ruokonen-Engler is a sociologist, research associate and lecturer in women’s and gender studies at the Institute of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences at Goethe University and a research fellow at the Institute for Social Research Frankfurt, Germany.

Her research interests lie in the field of gender, diversity, migration and qualitative research methods, especially biographical methods. Methodologically, she is interested in exploring the role of emotions and affects in qualitative research process. In her current research project, she is exploring social mobility, emotion work, love and affective (in)equalities, as well as transformations of gender and intergenerational relations in families of migrants.

She has written widely about gender, intersectionality, migration, and belonging; diversity, social inequality, racism and discrimination in institutional settings; gendered labour migration and societal integration; gender, diversity and anti-racist education in teaching, as well as about the use of interpretative research methods, especially biographical-narrative research approach, in the field of transnational migration studies.

Paulina Sabugal has a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Pisa.

She works as Teaching Assistant at Pisa University and collaborates with the European University Institute and the Historical Archives of the European Union in the framework of its educational programme organised in collaboration with FMA, the Former Member Association of the European Parliament. Her PhD project was on love and migration, specifically, the case of Mexican women who migrate to Italy because they fell in love with Italians. The axis of her work was studying love as a social category. In her research, bicultural couples became a kind of micro laboratory that allows to explore and to discuss dynamics of exclusion, discrimination, racism and integration in the context of the migration phenomenon. At the same time, this case study has allowed her to consider the cultural practices that are maintained and the ones that are lost during the migration process, besides discussing modern love and the market of affections in a globalized world through marriage, family, sexuality and gender roles. Over the years, she has investigated these questions on fieldwork in Italy, Spain, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. Areas of Interest: Migration Studies, Identity and belonging, cultural representations and signifying practices, narrative research, ethnographic methods, love and society, gender and mobility.

Yvonne Salt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Sussex.

Yvonne’s doctoral research is about love and migration. Many people migrate because they fall in love and many decide to settle in countries other than their own for the same reason. As such the work is about love and its relation to (im)mobility. Using the narratives of British migrants and their partners, the research hopes to explore people’s emotional experiences of love and migration, allowing for a consideration of what love and migration might mean for ordinary people. The research will allow for reflection on the ways that emotions, love and migration are enmeshed and add empirical research to discourses about perceived appropriate and inappropriate expressions of love in different cultural frameworks. Her research will problematise how gender, ethnicity, age and other social factors intersect with ordinary people’s experiences of love. The research will contribute to debates about how human emotions constitute place, in particular how love makes place and how place shapes the experience of love.

Tuija Saresma is docent of auto/biographical research at the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, Department of Arts and Culture Research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Her current research interests include writing as agency, affects, intersectionality, love as a repressive concept in the masculinist blogs, and populist rhetoric ( “gender populism”) in the social media. Saresma has written several articles and co-edited books on autobiographical writing, gender studies, cultural studies, interdisciplinary methodology, and feminist pedagogy. Saresma is the principal investigator in the research project on the idealizations of everyday life, home, and nation in contemporary popular blogs, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and a member of the research project Populism as a movement and rhetoric, funded by the Academy of Finland.

Swen Seebach is full professor at Abat Oliba CEU University and currently Vice-rector for Academic Affairs.

During his academic career he has been awarded with various scholarships (doctorate, post-doctorate, Juan de la Cierva) and distinctions (award for the best thesis of his year of promotion, Award Angel Herrera for excellent teaching). In 2017 he published his book Love and Society with the editorial Routledge. His current research focus is on the link between emotions, future imaginaries and emergencies (humanitarian, economic and biological emergencies) and their potential impact on love relationships and intimate relationships. He is IP of a research project focussing on citizens’ role in the management of the current COVID19 pandemic funded by Banco Santander. He is also a full member of the research group PROTCIS and currently edits a special issue on pandemics in the journal Digithum and co-edits a special issue on love and Simmel together with Paulina Sabugal in the journal Simmel Studies.

Eric Selinger is Professor of English at DePaul University, in Chicago, IL, Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

He is the author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and co-editor of three books on popular romance fiction: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? (Routledge, 2015, with William Gleason of Princeton University), New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2012, with Sarah S. G. Frantz), and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (Routledge, 2021, with Jayashree Kamblé and Hsu-Ming Teo). His current research focuses on the intellectual pleasures and metafictional aesthetics of popular romance novels: that is, on how these books invite not only affective responses, but active and playful thought about love, religion, history, sexuality, and genre.

Reenee Singh is the Chief Executive of the Association of Family Therapy and Systemic Practice.

She is founding director of the London Intercultural Couples Centre at the Child and Family Practice and co-director of the Tavistock and Portman Family Therapy and Systemic Research Centre. Reenee has written and published widely in the areas of ‘race’, culture and qualitative research. She is a visiting professor at the University of Bergamo.

Agata Stasinska – Sociologist, she holds a PhD in social sciences, University of Warsaw, Poland.

She was a research officer in the project Families of Choice in Poland at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences were she now works as assistant professor. Graduate of the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities and postgraduate of Gender Studies at the University of Warsaw. She coordinated organizing of national and international conferences i.e. Queer Kinship and Relationships (Polish Academy of Sciences 2015). She is the co-author of Families of choice in Poland. Family life of Nonheterosexual Persons (with Marta Abramowicz and Agata Stasińska, 2015). She co-edited books i.e. Strategie Queer. Od teorii do praktyki 2012 and special issues of journals such as: InterAlia and Studia Socjologiczne and published several articles on the sociology of intimate and familial life and sexuality e.g. Journal of Homosexuality, Sexualities, Studia Sociologiczne, Societas/Communitas and InterAlia.

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK, and Chair Professor of the Changjiang Scholar Programme, Shaanxi Normal University, China.

He has published extensively in cultural studies, including twenty-eight books. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. He is also on the editorial/advisory boards in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the USA, and has been a Visiting Professor at the universities of Vienna, Henan, and Wuhan, and a Senior Fellow at the Technical University of Dresden.

John is interested in how people use media when in romantic relationships. By use he means two things: the use of media discourses and the use of media technologies.

Christina Straub is a postdoctoral research assistant in Criminology/Sociology at the University of Durham, United Kingdom.

Dr Christina Straub´s vocation is centred around social anthropology, ethnography, and prison research. After graduating as a Cultural Scientist (MA) in Germany, her employment as Research Assistant for the Prisons Research Centre at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge led her into a high-security prison exploring staff-prisoner-relationships together with Prof Alison Liebling and Helen Arnold. The many stories and layers of the prison environment ever since continued to play a major role in her work. Currently she works with Dr Kate O´Brien at Durham University, evaluating the “Early Days in Custody” programme delivered by NEPACS and with Dr Kate Gooch at Bath University, exploring serious harm and violence at HMP Long Lartin. She is passionate about and inspired by multidisciplinary research aiming to deliver holistic insights into the micro- and macro-levels of human existence, vulnerability, and resilience.

Katherine Twamley is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Science at University College London, UK.

Her particular interests are around gender, love and intimacy, feminist practice, and family, with a geographical focus on India and the UK. Her work delves into micro-couple interactions through in-depth ethnographic and mixed methods research. She is recently completed a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship examining the intersections of love and gender equality amongst first-time parents in the UK. She is author of Love, Marriage and Intimacy Among Gujarati Indians: A Suitable Match (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which was shortlisted for the BSA Philip Abrams memorial prize, and co-editor of Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? (2018, UCL Press), as well as multiple other journal articles and book chapters.

Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist based in London (UK).

Mark became academically interested in love when writing a PhD on the role of friendship in Plato’s philosophical practice. He then wrote a book on friendship, The Meaning of Friendship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), which was aimed at a general audience with the goal of asking what friendship is, how it has carried social weight at various points in history, and how it plays a role in contemporary contexts, from identity politics to social media. As a psychotherapist, Mark has an interest in love from the perspective both of developmental psychology and in terms of the role of love in the therapeutic relationship. Another book, Love: All That Matters (Hodder Education, 2013) provides an account of how love can develop through periods of crisis, both personal and social, and alongside psychology draws on philosophy, mythology and everyday experience. Another strand of interest in love relates to love in spiritual traditions. In particular, his book, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey (Angelico Press, 2021), in part examines how love relates to the intellect and to guides, fostering a dialectic of unfolding and expansion. Mark’s current interest is focused on a design project, funded by the Fetzer Institute, which is looking at how love can be fostered in different environments through the aid of artefacts, practices and rituals. Working with designers, this project will produce practical outcomes that might make a difference in specific contexts. He is keen to work collaboratively and learn from as wide a range of experiences as possible.

Sandra Vlasta is a researcher at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, where she was a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-Fellow (2017-2020).

She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Vienna where she worked as a lecturer 2008-2012. Her research interests are: literature of migration, travelogues, multilingualism in literature, and postcolonial literature and theory. Her recent publications include “Contemporary Migration Literature in German and English: A Comparative Study” (Brill/Rodopi, 2016) and “Literarische (Mehr)Sprachreflexionen” (edited with Barbara Siller). Vienna: Praesens, 2020.

Catherine Vulliamy is a PhD student in Gender Studies at the University of Hull.

Catherine’s work is on the relationship between love and sexuality, and seeks to explore cultural meanings, understandings and constructions of both sexual orientation and love. She is particularly, but not exclusively, interested in the meanings and influence of love in the context of ‘fluid’ and ‘non-normative’ sexual desire, orientation and/or practice.

Justyna Wierzchowska is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw.

She holds MA degrees in American Studies and Philosophy, and a PhD in American Studies. She is the author of The Absolute and the Cold War: Discourses of Abstract Expressionism (2011), co-editor of In Other Words: Dialogizing Postcoloniality, Race, and Ethnicity (2012) and co-editor of the special issue of Open Cultural Studies titled On Uses of Black Camp (2018). She is currently working on two interrelated books Related for Life: Mothering in Contemporary Art and Self-Writing: Critical Theory after World War II. They are part of the research project Vulnerable Subjects: Relationality and the Primary Bond in Contemporary Culture and Critical Theory. Justyna Wierzchowska is a recipient of the Fulbright Commission Senior Scholar Award for the academic year 2019-20, the Bekker Scholarship for the academic year 2021-22 and the University of Warsaw Rector’s Individual Academic Award for the year 2020. Her research interests include motherhood studies, affect theory and psychoanalytical theory, attachment theory, contemporary American visual art, feminist art, socially-engaged art, art as social criticism. She teaches courses in Philosophy, History of American Art, Feminist Art, and Cultural Studies. She translates into Polish American modern fiction and art-related books.

Matt York is a PhD researcher at the Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork, Ireland.

He is currently facilitating a Collective Visioning Project exploring the thoughts, feelings, ideas and imaginings of a cross section of activists internationally, in pursuit of a theory and praxis of revolutionary love to animate radical social transformation in the 21st century. You can visit his research website here.

Mirjam Zadoff is a historian and director of the Munich NS-Documentation Centre.Munich NS-Documentation Centre is a museum and interdisciplinary centre for education and learning on the history of the Holocaust and Nazism, founded in 2015. From 2014 till 2019 Mirjam has held the Rosenfeld Chair in Jewish Studies and was a professor in history at Indiana University, Bloomington.