Sophie Corser is a writer and researcher from Birmingham, UK.

Her recent work includes an essay on reading as labour for the inaugural issue of Too Little/ Too Hard, a short piece on grief and romantic comedies for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a multimedia listener’s guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses for the audiobook app Audrey.

She is currently working on a book of creative non-fiction about reading connections and communities.

In 2023, she was awarded a Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowship to carry out research at Smith College Libraries Special Collections in Northampton, Massachusetts. She spent a week reading Alison Bechdel’s fan mail.

From 2021-23, she held a 100k euro research grant from the Irish Research Council. At University College Cork, she built a creative-critical project on contemporary representations of women’s reading in fiction and non-fiction.

Between 2019 and 2021, her writing was funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. At University College Dublin, she wrote a book about James Joyce.

Sophie’s literary criticism includes a 2024 article for Textual Practice on queerness and critical uncertainty, along with articles on reading and work in contemporary Irish women’s writing and Homeric scholarship and made-up authors in Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sophie is the author of The Reader’s Joyce: ‘Ulysses’, Authorship and the Authority of the Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), an academic study about interpretation.

She was also a keynote speaker at the 2024 International James Joyce Symposium, at the University of Glasgow.

The Reader’s Joyce has been reviewed in the James Joyce Quarterly, the Dublin Review of Books, The Modernist Review, and English Studies.

Sophie has a PhD in English from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has taught on criticism and writing at Goldsmiths and University College Cork, spoken at public events and conferences across Europe and North America, and contributed to podcasts including Too Little/ Too Hard and women read.