My name is Ilina Jha. I’m entering my final year of study as a BA English Literature student, and I worked as a Collaborative Research Intern on Dr Amy Burge’s Project ‘Reading and reviewing the ‘bonkbuster’ 1970-1990’.
I had three main jobs to do during my internship. The first one was assisting at the International Association of the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) conference Romance Revisited. I spent one morning at the check-in desk, ensuring that any new arrivals to the conference were checked in and provided with name tags. Amy was kind enough to allow those of us working a shift at the conference to attend other panel events happening, which was a fantastic opportunity that allowed me to meet with academics and hear about their fascinating research.
My second job was researching newspaper archives for articles related to ‘bonkbuster’ novels and their authors from 1970-1990. I was tasked with searching the archives for The Guardian and The Observer by inputting key search terms provided by Amy. I then logged information from relevant articles into an Excel spreadsheet, including the date of publication, the type of article, and a summary of its content. At times this was an overwhelming task – my search for ‘jilly cooper’ in the 1970-1990 date range yielded over 600 results! However, I focused on working through as many articles as I could in the time available to me during my internship. Many of the articles I read were very interesting, and I even came across some items that were fascinating and informative beyond the scope of the research I was collecting for the ‘bonkbuster’ project.
My third job was transcribing a recorded Zoom call of a focus group, in which readers of ‘bonkbuster’ novels during the years 1970-1990 were asked questions about and discussed ‘bonkbusters’, why they read, what they thought about them, etc. Zoom had auto-generated a transcript, so I used this as a base to work from, reading through and correcting errors that had been made. Again, this was at times an overwhelming task, because I found it took a long time to correct the transcript and make it as accurate as possible. I managed this by not attempting to complete the task all at once, but instead breaking it down and completing it over a few days; this made it much easier to tackle. Furthermore, I enjoyed and valued listening to the participants on the Zoom focus group. I cannot repeat anything that was said for confidentiality reasons, but I found that hearing what these readers of the ‘bonkbuster’ novels had to say encouraged me to be more open-minded and less judgemental about this genre of books. I found their comments and insights very interesting and thoughtful, and they were very different from the reviews and opinions about ‘bonkbuster’ novels I had encountered in my newspaper archive research.
Overall, my research internship experience was challenging but hugely enjoyable and rewarding. I would highly recommend the Collaborative Research Internship programme to any student!
Ilina Jha, BA English