Michelle J. Smith teaches units on fairy tale and children’s literature. Her primary research areas include femininity in Victorian print culture and Australian children's literature. Her most recent monograph is Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1850-1915 (EUP, 2022). Recent and current projects in children's literature include the edited collection Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others (UWP, 2021) and a history of Australian fairy tales. 

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 four books in the fields of children’s literature and Victorian literature, including 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, New Statesman and the Sydney Morning Herald. 

Michelle especially welcomes potential honours students in any area of children's/YA literature, fairy tales, fantasy fiction, Victorian literature and culture, gender/feminism in relation to literature, and colonial literature. She is also able to supervise creative writing projects, particularly children's/YA writing and topics relating to fairy-tale traditions or the Gothic.