Dr Leander Reeves

Senior Lecturer in Publishing

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Personal Profile

Leander's research interests include: hyperreality, popular culture, the history of consumer magazines, nostalgia, the British Empire, propaganda, power, time travel, science fiction, gender and celebrity in consumer magazines. Leander is a hyperreality historian and her research often appears in modules for this degree and for others. 

She is able to ruin Christmas for students in a just few lecture slides, her house is full of sci-fi and her office is full of magazines. 

Academic and professional history

  • PhD Mapping the Source of the Hyperreal: Re-evaluating the Emergence of Hyperreality
  • PCTHE – Oxford Brookes University
  • MA Electronic Media – Oxford Brookes University
  • BA Hons Publishing and Visual Studies – Oxford Brookes University
  • Communications Officer – Oxford Brookes University Students' Union, Oxford
  • Editor of the Students' Union magazine, The Last Edition. The 36-page magazine appeared 9 times each year. She also acted as press spokesperson for the Oxford Brookes Students’ Union
  • Launched commercial agency and creative bureau, The Student Bureau 
  • Design & Marketing Coordinator – Oneworld Publications, Oxford
  • Managing Editor – International Antiques, IA Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK and Rennes, France. Managed specialist antiques magazine features aimed at European market. Bi-lingual publication, published in English and French in Rennes, France.
  • Design Projects Manager & Multimedia Lecturer – Oxford House Group, London
  • Design Manager – International Education Group
  • Freelance Print and Interactive Designer – Perfectbound, an imprint of HarperCollins and Global Software Publishing North American. Package design for GSP’s interactive CDRom titles (for Dorling Kindersley), including print catalogue, and designed and developed an interactive Flash catalogue for schools in USA.
  • Multimedia Consultant – The Homeless Organisation of America. Developed & designed a print and web strategy for the charity based in NYC.
  • Freelance interactive designer – Greenpeace, UK.

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Death of the Author
  • Contexts
  • Journalism and Popular Culture
  • Media and Propaganda

Postgraduate Teaching

  • Media Power and Public Affairs

Research

Leander’s main area of teaching intersects media, publishing, journalism and culture. Leander has published on celebrity, hyperreality, The Goldbergs, nostalgia, American culture, Westworld, time travel, Princess Diana, and she can sometimes be heard on BBC Radio Oxford discussing contemporary cultural issues. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Magazine Media. 

Her research interests include: hyperreality - and everything that intersects with it from politics and journalism to popular culture, nostalgia and television. 

Leander has given many papers at academic conferences on topics centred around culture and media, nostalgia and hyperreality, gender and consumer magazines. From “The Politics of Nostalgia: Queer, Strange and Hyperreal on the American Screen” at the British Association of American Studies, to “Is magazine publishing still powerful enough to shape societal values?” at By the Book 6 Power Dynamics in Publishing, Florence (Italy). Her research is interdisciplinary and spans the full gamut of media, its platforms and influences; she finds most things interesting!  

Editorships

Leander is the Associate Editor of The Journal of Magazine Media https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/739 

Books and other publications

Chapters

"Diana: magazines, her celebrity and its lasting impact on an industry" in Stam, D. and Scott, A. (2014) Inside Magazine Publishing. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group

"Yul Brynner's Hat and Time Travel in the Hyperreal" Goody, A. and Mackay, A. (eds) (2019) Reading westworld. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan

"In the engine room of the hyperreal: nostalgia as commodity culture" Flynn, S. and Mackay, A. (eds) (2021) Screening American Nostalgia : essays on pop culture constructions of past times. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.