Dr Alice Bennett
SENIOR LECTURER
English
0151 291 3319
benneta1@hope.ac.uk
Short Biography
Before joining the department at Hope, I taught at Durham University, where I also completed my PhD. I have a BA from the University of Warwick and an MA from UCL.
I have research interests in contemporary literature and culture, the health humanities, and contemporary British women’s writing.
Teaching Specialisms:
My teaching and research focus on literature from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At Hope, I teach our undergraduate courses on modernism, postcolonial literature, literary theory, contemporary bookselling and publishing, and twenty-first-century writing. In our first- and second-year teaching, I lecture on writers including Homer, Herman Melville, Mina Loy, Derek Walcott, Ali Smith, and Kazuo Ishiguro, and on our MA in English Literature I convene modules on theory, science fiction, fantasy, and graphic narrative. I also teach our first-year writing tutorials and our third-year research skills tutorials.
I'm very happy to hear from prospective applicants for taught or research degrees at Hope who have interests in my area. You can email me at benneta1@hope.ac.uk.
School/Faculty Roles:
I'm the course co-ordinator for the final year of the English Literature BA and I also co-ordinate assessment for all our programmes in the School of Humanities.
I've written on HE issues in various places, including Wordplay and The New Statesman. I'm also deputy editor of C21 Literature: Journal of Twenty-First-Century Writings, the open-access journal of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies.
I've examined PhDs and MRes degrees in English Literature and in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Huddersfield, the University of Birmingham, Newman University and Queen's University Belfast. I've have also served as External Examiner for the BAs in English Literature and in Creative Writing at the University of Sunderland and as an external for the validation of the BA in Cultural Studies at Wirral Metropolitan College.
Recent works:
My most recent book is called Alarm (Bloomsbury, 2023) and focuses on the history and cultural meaning of alarms, alerts, sirens and warnings. The book develops some interests in alertness, waking, vigilance, safety cultures and health/medical humanities which I've been working on for a few years. My research on related topics includes some ongoing work in critical sleep studies which looks at representations of sleeplessness in contemporary writing, If you're interested in my work on sleep, you might enjoy my contributions to the BBC's Free Thinking programme on Sleep Justice and Sleeplessness from April 2024.
My second book, Contemporary Fictions of Attention (Bloomsbury, 2018), investigated literature's engagement with the concepts of managed attention and distraction. You can read some reviews of this book in The TLS, C21 and The Review of English Studies. My first book, Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction, analysed the narrative strategies of fictional afterlives. If you want to see more of my past research, you can access my work through my Google scholar profile.
I am currently writing a book about the work of Ali Smith for the Writers and their Work series.
Publications and Projects:
Books
- Ali Smith. Writers and their Work, Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2026.
- Alarm. Bloomsbury, 2023.
- Contemporary Fictions of Attention: Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century. Bloomsbury, 2018.
- Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave, 2012.
Refereed Journal Articles
- '"People with equal but opposite afflictions, propping each other up": Sleep Solidarity and Fictions of Mass Sleeplessness'. MFS 68.3, 2022: 525-543.
- '"This Ridiculous Thing that Passes for a Passport": Seeking Asylum in Ali Smith's Fiction". Contemporary Women's Writing 12.3, 2018: 322-337.
- 'Cold Reading A. L. Kennedy's The Blue Book'. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56.2, 2015: 173-189.
- 'Anticipated Returns: Purgatory, Exchange and Narrative After Life'. The Oxford Literary Review 31.1, 2009: 33-48.
- 'Unquiet Spirits: Death Writing in Contemporary Fiction'. Textual Practice 23.3, 2009: 461-479.
Chapters
- 'Watching and Waking: Between Critical Sleep Studies and Critical Attention Studies'. Sleep and its Meanings. Ed. Diletta de Cristofaro. MIT Press, forthcoming.
- ‘The Ethics of Carelessness: Inattention in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. The Ethics of (In)attention. Eds. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Routledge, forthcoming 2024.
- 'Fiction in the Age of Distraction: Reading and Attention in the 2010s'. The 2010s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. Eds. Philip Tew, Emily Horton, Nick Hubble and Nick Bentley. Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2024.
- 'Wallace and Attention'. David Foster Wallace in Context. Ed. Clare Hayes-Brady. Cambridge UP, 2022.
- '"'Tuning into my 'awareness continuum'": Optimized Attention in The Yips'. Nicola Barker: Critical Essays. Ed. Berthold Schoene. Gylphi, 2020.
- 'Literature and Afterlife'. The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Eds. Daniel Jernigan, Neil Murphy and Michelle Wang. Routledge, 2020.
- 'Afterlife'. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature: Literary Theory. Ed. John Frow et al. OUP, 2019.
- 'Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan's Twenty-First Century Novels'. What Happens Now: 21st-Century Writing. Eds. Sian Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard. Palgrave, 2013.
Special Editions of Journals
- Co-editor, with Peter Sloane. The Short Things. Special Issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies 1.2, 2019.
- Co-editor, with Naomi Banks. Afterlives. Special issue of Kaleidoscope 4.1, 2010.
Reviews
- "Humble Attentions" Review of The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative by Jean-Michel Ganteau, Contemporary Literature, forthcoming 2024.
- Review of Time and Literature, by Thomas M. Allen, Modern Language Review, 115.2, 2020: 439-440.
- Review of The Cruft of Fiction, by David Letzler, Modern Language Review 113.4, 2018: 874-875.
Public Events
- Origin Stories: Migration. Being Human Festival of the Humanities, Museum of Liverpool (17 November 2018)
- Not Sleeping: A One-Night Symposium on Wakefulness, Liverpool Hope University (8 September 2017). Funded by the Wellcome Trust.