About

I’m Ika Willis. In my professional life, I’m the Lecturer in Reception at the University of Bristol (once described in the Bristol Evening Post as ‘Bristol University’s expert in how books are read’). I teach mainly in the English and Classics department, but also contribute some critical-theory-related teaching to other departments in the Faculty of Arts. I’m the Programme Director for the MA in Reception and Critical Theory, and I work mainly on and with critical theory (including deconstruction, feminism, reception/reader-response theory, and queer and trans theory). I’m interested in how people make use of texts, pasts, and words, and especially in what happens when texts, pasts, and words are quoted, decontextualized, recontextualized, recycled, institutionalized, politicized, or otherwise transformed. I’ve just written a book called Now and Rome, which came out from Continuum in late 2010.

In my amateur life, I write fan fiction, make fan vids, watch telly, and knit. I think of myself as an old-school fan; I like stories with adjectives about people who love each other very much, and stories with politics which critically reorient canon. (Stories with adjectives and politics are heaven.) I edited an all-femslash Blake’s 7 zine in 2002, but my heart is really with m/m. I vid (not very competently) mainly about my OTPs, Blake/Avon from Blake’s 7 and Snape/Harry from Harry Potter. I like telly programmes about communities of people who are working together for something they all believe in (Blake’s 7, Scrubs, Rosanne, Black Books). I like knitting things from Knitty.com, mainly jumpers and socks, but I’ve recently fallen for lacework in a big way.

In this blog, I write in an amateurish way – passionately, provisionally, and in a way which seeks responses and community – about things related to my professional life, and about the relationships between what I do professionally and what I do as an amateur.

If you’re counting, I’m cisgendered, white, British, atheist/pagan, 35 years old, temporarily-able-bodied, and a butch lesbian in a long-term relationship with an older femme.

Oh! And finally, my mum and my undergraduate students sometimes read this blog, so I will not be posting direct links to any of my fanfiction here. If you know my pseuds, you can find the Harry Potter fic at the main Harry/Snape site and (eventually) at An Archive Of Our Own, and the Blake’s 7 fic at the Hermit Library.