Hannah Doermann

Professional Bio

Hannah Doermann is a teacher and scholar of gender studies and contemporary U.S. American literature. Her research on Young Adult literature (YA), girls' studies, and fan studies has been published and is forthcoming in The Lion and the Unicorn and Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Her current book project, Girls Will Be Girls: Reimagining Girlhood in Young Adult Literature, offers girlhood as a category of analysis that enables new ways of understanding the subversive potential of Young Adult literature. Reading Young Adult novels alongside theories of temporality from queer studies, postcolonial studies, and youth and childhood studies as well as real girls' affective responses to YA in online fan communities, this book argues that YA proposes anti-teleological models of subject formation that counter the colonial model of adolescence as a transitional stage on the linear path to adulthood. Problematizing simplistic understandings of diversity and representation in YA publishing, YA fan communities, and YA studies, her project explores how YA’s reimaginations of girlhood unearth unexpected ways YA challenges age-based, gendered, and racial hierarchies.