Rachel Sykes is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary American Literature at the University of Birmingham. Their first book, The Quiet Contemporary American Novel, was published with Manchester University Press in 2017. It is the first study to develop a theory of quiet as a narrative aesthetic in contemporary fiction and shows how, as a phrase, “the quiet novel” has a long and untraced history dating back to the 1860s in British and American periodicals. Post-quietness, they are developing new work based in contemporary feminisms, memoir studies, and popular culture. Their second book project, currently in the early stages of development, will function as an updated study of confession in an era of neoliberalism. They published an article on popular and critical use of the term oversharing and its relationship to gendered online identities with Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and they are currently writing about discourses of risk and precarity in contemporary confessional writing.
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