Michelle J. Smith teaches units on fairy tale, children’s and young adult literature, and Victorian literature. Her primary research areas include femininity in Victorian print culture and British and Australian children's literature. Her most recent monograph is Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1850-1915 (EUP, 2022), while two co-edited collections were published in 2024: Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods (co-edited with Moruzi, Palgrave, 2024) and The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals (co-edited with Moruzi and Beth Rodgers, 2024). Michelle recently took up a Bechtel Visiting Professorship at the Baldwin Library at the University of Florida to research nineteenth-century children's editions of "Aladdin". Her current book project examines the natural environment in classic children's fantasy.

Michelle is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840-1940) (U of Toronto P, 2018, with Clare Bradford and Kristine Moruzi) and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (Palgrave, 2011), which won the European Society for the Study of English's prize for best first book. She has also co-edited seven books in the fields of children’s literature and Victorian literature, including Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others (UWP, 2021), Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017) and Victorian Environments: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture (Palgrave, 2018). Michelle writes regularly for popular media and has published articles in the Age, Washington Post, the Guardian, the Conversation, The UNESCO Courier and the Sydney Morning Herald. 

Michelle especially welcomes potential honours, Masters, and PhD students in any area of children's/YA literature, fairy tales, fantasy fiction, Victorian literature and culture, gender/feminism, ecocriticism, and colonial literature. She has also supervised numerous creative writing projects to completion, and can take on creative writing supervisions, especially if the topic relates to one of the special interests noted above.