Profile

Biography

Alice joined the Department of English and Related Literature in 2012 as a Lecturer in Contemporary and Global Literature.

Alice studied for her BA, MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge at Girton and then Darwin College. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has taught at Université Paris VII: Denis Diderot; Université Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Cambridge. 

Alice's research and teaching interests are in 20th and 21st century Anglophone literature. She has a particular interest in the areas of disability studies, medical humanities, literature and the body, cultural representations of disability and autobiographical fiction.

In 2013, Alice was one of ten academics chosen as ‘New Generation Thinkers’ by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC.  With Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya, she set up a new MA in Medical History and Humanities, which launched in 2016. In 2017, she was awarded a Springboard Fellowship by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Wellcome Trust.

Research

Overview

Alice works in the Modern Research School. She is a member of three interdisciplinary centres at York: the Centre for Modern Studies, the WHO-affiliated Centre for Global Health Histories and the Coma and Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre.

Her first book, Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. Alice’s second book, Literature and Disability: Contemporary Critical Thought was published by Routledge in 2015.  She is the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability.

Alice has also published journal articles and book chapters on African American literature, literature and disability theory, cultural representations of disability, autobiographical fiction, memory, and medical humanities. Alice worked with Professor Tobin Siebers from the University of Michigan to guest edit a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on the theme of disability and visual culture which was published in 2015.

In 2013, Alice was selected by the BBC and AHRC as one of the ten New Generation Thinkers. In this role, she has made broadcasts for BBC Radio 3’s arts and ideas programmes ‘Night Waves’ and ‘The Essay’, BBC Arts television, and given talks at the BBC’s Free Thinking Festival.

In 2014 Alice received funding from the Wellcome Trust funded Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders (C2D2) at York for research projects on memory in contemporary fiction and life writing, and a video installation on adolescent health. She is currently PI on two Wellcome Trust grants to support the Northern Network for Medical Humanities which aims to foster connections between universities, arts and health organisations in the north through a series of research workshops (2014-2017).

In 2017 Alice was awarded a Springboard Fellowship by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Wellcome Trust for her project, ‘Cultures of Care’.

Supervision

Alice welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students interested in pursuing doctoral work in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literature and culture, in relation to any of her particular areas of interest. 

She is currently acting as an advisor on doctoral projects on Anglo-American disability poetry, African American literature and technology, and First World War care narratives.

Publications

Selected publications

Books

(ed.) The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability. London and New York: Routledge, in preparation.

Literature and Disability: Contemporary Critical Thought. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Edited Collections

Guest editor of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies special issue on “Disability and Visual Culture” with Professor Tobin Siebers. Liverpool University Press, 2015.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“Prosthesis.” Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology. Ed. Adam Hammond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in preparation.

“Disability and the Short Story.” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English. Ed. Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.

“Zip Zip My Brain Harts: Disability, Photography and Auto/Biography.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 9.3 (2015): 265-276.

“Representing Chronic Disorders of Consciousness: The Problem of Voice in Allende’s Paula.” Literature and Medicine. 32.1 (2014): 133-147. 

“Visualising Disability: Conflict, Culture, and Photojournalism.” Changing Social Attitudes to Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural and Educational Studies. Ed. David Bolt. London: Routledge, 2014. 

“Ageing and Autobiography: Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year and Roth’s Exit Ghost.” Philip Roth and World Literature: Transatlantic Perspectives and Uneasy Passages. Ed. Velichka Ivanova. New York: Cambria Press, 2014.

“Autre-Biography: Disability and Life Writing in Coetzee’s Later Works.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 6.1 (2012): 53-67.

“Fiction and Faction: Narrating the Self in Writing for Teenage Readers.” Teenagers and Reading: Literary Heritages, Cultural Contexts and Contemporary Reading Practices. Ed. Jacqueline Manuel, and Sue Brindley. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2012.

“An Unfinished Portrait: Biography and Portraiture in Toni Morrison’s Writing.” Interdisciplinary Humanities.  Special issue. Ed. Susan Morris. Fall (2011): 44-55.

“No Place Like Home: Journeying in Toni Morrison’s Writing.” [Inter]Sections 16.4 (2011).

Teaching

Undergraduate

Alice convenes the third year special module, ‘The Body in Modern American Fiction and Culture’. She also lectures and teaches on the Global Literatures, Translations and Key Concepts first year modules.

Postgraduate

With Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya (History, York), Alice set up a new MA in Medical History and Humanities, which launched in Autumn 2016. She acts as convenor for this MA and teachers the ‘Writing the Body’ option module on African American literature. Alice also contributes to teaching on the core courses for the MA in Global Literature and Culture and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture.

External activities

Memberships

Alice is a founding member of the member of the Northern Network for Medical Humanities. She is also a member of the British Society for Literature and Science.

She has taken part in public engagement events at Cardiff Book Talk and the BBC Free Thinking Festival at the Sage in Gateshead.  As one of ten New Generation Thinkers selected by the AHRC and BBC in 2013, Alice has made broadcasts about her research for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Night Waves’ and ‘The Essay’, and for BBC Arts television.

She is part of a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the University of York who put together the ‘3Sixty: Jane’s Story’ installation on adolescent health and is currently involved in a project on Poetry and Illness that was included in York’s Festival of Ideas.