Books

Through the Long Corridor of Distance: Space and Self in Contemporary New Zealand Women’s Autobiographies (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Brill, 2014) explores the autobiographies and memoirs of major New Zealand women writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Janet Frame, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Fiona Kidman, and others. Using innovative spatial perspectives, the book reveals how these life narratives inhabit and construct place, identity, and memory. Challenging the idea of autobiography as purely self-referential, it uncovers the rich, outward-looking worlds these writers create through their own distinctive horizons.

Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame, and Marguerite Duras (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Brill, 1997) examines the autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame, and Marguerite Duras, uncovering how these four women—across different cultures and histories—resist the social forces shaping their identities. Through a comparative lens, the book reveals striking connections in their narratives of defiance, offering a powerful reflection on gender, agency, and self-construction in the twentieth century.

Edited Volumes

Women Writing Intimacy and Resistance: Not So Private Conversations. Co-edited with Corinne Bigot, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Nathalie Saudo-Welby, Stephanie Genty. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
The collection explores how women writers, in the English-speaking world transform personal intimacy into political engagement, challenging cultural oppression across genres—life writing, novels, poetry, and theatre—from the the nineteenth century to today, guided by the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” It bridges feminist, decolonial, ethnic and queer studies, revealing how gender-based domination interesects with other forms of oppression.

Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self. Co-edited with Corinne Bigot, Claire Bazin, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Stephanie Genty. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
This book explores how American and British women from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century navigate the interplay of words and images in life writing. From traditional autobiographies to graphic memoirs, quilts, and digital performances, it examines how women use or withhold images strategically. Featuring painters-turned-writers, novelists-turned-artists, and creators who blur the line between text and image, the book sheds light on the politics and poetics of visual storytelling in women’s autobiographical expression.

Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself. Co-edited with Corinne Bigot, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Claire Bazin, Stephanie Genty. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
This collection of essays explores how women’s life writing—memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, travel narratives, graphic memoirs—engages with the act of reading. Spanning authors from Virginia Woolf to the voices of slave narratives, the volume examines how reading shapes self-narration, resists imposed identities, and deepens the writer’s connection to the world. It highlights the diverse, often complex roles reading plays in women’s writing, offering fresh perspectives and contributing to current debates in life writing studies.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

• “‘Weaving the Story of My Aiga’: Poetics and Politics of Transmission in Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged.” Postcolonial Literature and Arts, June 2025.
• “‘Sex (Mis)Education’ in Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged (1996) and Freelove (2016).” Alizés, 2024.
• “‘I am niu voices’: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Poetic Re-Imagining of Pacific Literature.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Vol. 41.1, 2018.
• “‘Creating a Usable Past’: The 1981 Springbok Tour in Fiona Kidman’s New Zealand Memoirs.” Cultures of the Commonwealth, 2016-17.
• “‘I am She Who Does Not Speak About Herself’: The Impersonal Autobiography.” European Journal of Life Writing, Vol. 7, 2018.
• “‘To Ibiza: Separation and Recreation in Frame’s Island Narrative.’” Journal of New Zealand Literature, Vol. 26, 2009.
• “Autonomie et langue de spécialité : enjeux et perspectives,” Les Cahiers de l’APLIUT, Volume XXVII n°2, juin 2008.
• ‘“Diamonds of the dustheap” : à quoi servent les journaux des femmes ?,” MOSAIC, University of Manitoba, Vol. 40, No 4, Dec 2007.
• “New Zealand Music History and the French Avant-Garde,” British Review of New Zealand Studies, Volume 16, 2006/2007.
• ‘“Wrestling with a monster’: contexte et textes autobiographiques d’écrivaines néo-zélandaises,” Cultures of the Commonwealth 12, Winter 2005-2006.
• “‘Home, What Home? : Frame’s Representation of Travel in The Envoy from Mirror City,’” Cahiers du CIRHiLL (UCO, Angers), Vol. N° 28, 2005.
• ‘“Nées entre deux guerres” : autobiographie et histoire chez trois écrivaines néo-zélandaises.” Cultures of the Commonwealth, N° 11, Winter 2004-2005, 87-99.
• ‘“Porteuse de la vie des autres”: Ernaux’s Journal du dehors as Anti-diary,” Women in French Studies, Vol. 10, 2002, 177-188.
• “Auto-evaluation and Language Learning,” Innovations in Teaching and Training International, 34, N°2, May 1997.
• “Love on the Mekong: The photo portrait of the young narrator in Duras’s The Lover,” AUMLA Journal, 84, November 1995.

Book Chapters

“Setting the Stage: Theoretical Reflections on Intimacy and Politics in Women’s Texts.” In: Women Writing Intimacy and Resistance: Not So Private Conversations. Co-edited with Corinne Bigot et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

  “Caught in the Hinge of a Slowly Opening Door”? Colonial Legacy and Gender Inequality in Robin Hyde’s Autobiographical Writings. Women Writing Intimacy and Resistance: Not So Private Conversations. Co-edited with Corinne Bigot et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

“Introduction” in Text and Image in Women’s Life Writing: Picturing the Female Self. Co-edited with Corinne Bigot et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

“’The trouble with a book…: Reading, Writing and Transgression in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?”, Baisnée-Keay, Valérie et al., Women's Life Writing and Practice of Reading:  She Reads to Write Herself, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

“Introduction,” Baisnée-Keay, Valérie, Alexoae-Zagni, Nicoleta, Bigot, Corinne, Bazin, Claire (dir.), Women's Life Writing and Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself, Londres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

“Bodies Revisited? Representations of the Embodied Self in Janet Frame’s and Lauris Edmond’s Autobiographies.” In Women’s Identities and Bodies in Colonial and Postcolonial History and Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

“‘My Many Selves’: Katherine Mansfield’s Diaries.” In Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Continuum Books, 2011.

“Songs of Innocence or Songs of Experience? The Construction of Childhood in Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories.” In Chasing Butterflies – Janet Frame’s The Lagoon and Other Stories, Publibook, 2011.

“A Home in Language: The Metaphysical World of Janet Frame’s Poetry.” In Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame, Rodopi, 2009.