I’m Ika Willis. I am a Senior Lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales. My staff page at Wollongong is here. I also have an academia.edu page, here, where you can find open-access manuscript copies of most of my publications.

This website collects some information about my research and teaching. I have a page for undergraduate students and a page for postgraduates (both currently in development). From 2010-2015 I kept an intermittent research blog, which is also archived here.

I teach a range of undergraduate courses at Wollongong, including “Dreams and Visions in Literature and Film”, “Scrolls, Books and Blogs: The History of Books, the History of Reading”, and (with Dr Guy Davidson) “Desiring Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Literature and Film”. I supervise numerous excellent Honours and PhD students, working on topics related to gender, sexuality, science-fiction, fandom and transformative rewriting, literary tradition, narratology, and reception.

In my research, I’m primarily interested in reception – how we make sense of, recycle, and reuse texts. Within this very broad area, my own interests lie in the ways our readings are mediated (by conventions, institutional norms, the affordances of various technologies, and so on) and the ways in which they are legitimated or delegitimated. I work in particular on “bad readings” and amateur practices of meaning-making.

I am currently writing a book called Reception for Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series. This is an overview of the field of reception, reading, and reader-response studies. It draws from a range of fields including literary theory, book history, Cultural Studies, and Classics, and is organized around the various different objects that reception scholars study. Further down the track is my own reception-theory monograph, which has the working title What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.