Love, Theoretically

Ali Hazelwood is a best-selling Italian author, professor, and neuroscientist. Love, Theoretically is preceded by two novels and three novellas. Her first book, the New York Times bestseller and TikTok sensation The Love Hypothesis, was originally a work of Star Wars fan fiction published online three years prior to its publication by the Berkley imprint at Penguin Random House. Hazelwood is known for her romantic comedies set in the world of academia and featuring women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). As a neuroscientist and professor herself, Hazelwood uses her personal experience as a woman in STEM to address and confront many of the issues plaguing women in academia and to give positive examples of strong and intelligent women as well as empathetic men.

Hazelwood’s “STEMinist” novels utilize many similar tropes from the genre of contemporary romantic comedies. For example, The Love Hypothesis and Love, Theoretically both employ the tropes of “fake dating” and “forced proximity,” and all her writings follow an “enemies to lovers” plotline in which the two primary characters do not like each other at the beginning of the story but fall in love by its end. Many of her works also include characters on the aromantic/asexual spectrum, an umbrella term for those who do not experience romantic or sexual attraction (“

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