Janice Radway is an American scholar who earned degrees from Michigan State University and SUNY Stony Brook. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, where she also served as chair of the Literature Program. Radway wrote the important work "Reading Romance", which used ethnographic research to study the popular romance novel genre and its audience of female fans. Her work sought to understand how this interpretive community made meaning from and judged different works within the genre.