Professor Danielle Fuller BA, MA, PhD

Photograph of Dr Danielle Fuller

Department of English Literature
Honorary Senior Research Fellow

Contact details

Email
dfuller@alberta.ca
Twitter
@DrDFuller

My major areas of research are contemporary cultures of reading, Canadian literature and interdisciplinary research methods that combine textual and empirical modes of investigation.  I also have interests in popular culture, book history and publishing.

I have always been interested in the ways that people make sense of their everyday lives and how lived experience is a type of knowledge that is often ignored or side-lined by people with the most power in a society.  Everything I investigate is shaped in some way by these concerns and by an approach to research that might broadly be described as that of feminist epistemology. Things that I think about and work on include: questions of literary and cultural value within and beyond writing and reading communities; enquiries about the role reading plays in peoples’ lives; understanding the decisions and choices people make after pregnancy loss about the disposal of remains.

Since 2003 all of my research has been collaborative and interdisciplinary.  I was PI for the ‘Beyond the Book’ project funded by the AHRC 2005-8 (www.beyondthebook.bham.ac.uk); for ‘Reading Lives’ (2012-14) and ‘Babbling Beasts:  Telling Stories, Making Digital Games.  Exploring Reading and Writing for Life’ (2017-8ff) both funded by Art Council England. Until I left the UK in May 2018, I was the PI for ESRC-funded ‘Death Before Birth: Understanding, informing and supporting the choices made by people who have experienced miscarriage, termination, and stillbirth.’ (ES/N008359/1). I’m working on this project with Professor Jeannette Littlemore (English Language and Applied Linguistics, U of Birmingham) and Dr Sheelagh McGuinness (Law, U of Bristol).

You can find out more about my current research activities and publications on my University of Alberta staff pages.

Qualifications

  • PhD (Leeds)
  • MA (Leeds)
  • BA (Durham)

Biography

I was trained as a literary studies scholar and began my academic career as a Canadian Studies specialist.  Over the years my research became more like cultural sociology in its use of empirical methods, but I remain committed to work that combines these with textual methods – and indeed, with other ways of working, doing and knowing from multiple disciplines.   My absolute favourite thing intellectually speaking is working with interdisciplinary scholars and arts practitioners to investigate complex contemporary social and cultural issues.

I worked at the University of Birmingham for nearly 21 years, first, in the Department of American & Canadian Studies (1997-2014), and then in the Department of English Literature (2014-18).  I emigrated to Canada in May 2018, and I now work as a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Publications

2013) with DeNel Rehberg Sedo.  Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture.  New York and London: Routledge. Paperback, 2015.

(2004) Writing the everyday: Women's textual communities in Atlantic Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. Winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize (English-language) 2005

Chapters in Books (selected)

Fuller, Danielle and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2016. ‘Fun…And Other Reasons for Sharing Reading With Strangers: Mass Reading Events and the Possibilities of Pleasure.’ In McKechnie, Lynne (E.F.), Knut Oterholm, Paulette M. Rothbauer and Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad, eds. Plotting the Reading Experience: Theory/Practice/Politics. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 133-147.  

Fuller, Danielle. 2012. ‘Beyond CanLit(e): Reading. Interdisciplinarity. Trans-Atlantically.’ Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias.  Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, TransCanada Series, 65-85.

Fuller, Danielle and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2012. ‘Mixing It Up: Using Mixed Methods to Investigate Contemporary Cultures of Reading.’  In From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Anouk Lang. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 234-51. 

Articles (selected)

Fuller, Danielle and Julie Rak. 2015. “True Stories”, Real Lives: Canada Reads 2012 and the Effects of Reading Memoir in Public.’ Studies in Canadian Literature.  40.2: 25-45.  (pub date: March 2016)

Fuller, Danielle and DeNel Rehberg Sedo.  2014. ‘Reproducing “the Wow Factor”?: Negotiating the Values of Reading Through One Book, One Community Events. ’ In Patrick Spedding and Anna Poletti (eds.) ‘Revealing the Reader’.  Special issue of Australian Humanities Review 56 (May 2014): 163-186.

Fuller, Danielle and DeNel Rehberg Sedo.  2014. ‘“And then we went to the brewery”: Reading as a Social Activity in a Digital Era.’ Popular feature commissioned for World Literature Today 88.3: 14-18.