Dr Alexandra Lewis
Senior Lecturer
School of Humanities, Creative Ind and Social Sci
Career Summary
Biography
Alexandra Lewis joined the University of Newcastle in 2019. She arrived from Aberdeen, Scotland, where she was Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Director of the Centre for the Novel, and Undergraduate Programme Coordinator of Creative Writing. Alexandra has also taught, supervised, and held research fellowships at the Universities of Cambridge, Goldsmiths College London, School of Advanced Study London, and Warwick.
During her PhD in English Literature at the University of Cambridge, Alexandra held a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust award and Trinity College research scholarship. She was University Medallist at the University of Sydney, where she completed her BA(Hons).
Alexandra has published widely on literature and psychology/medicine; nineteenth-century fiction; and contemporary literature. Recent publications include the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights (2019) and an edited collection on The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Current projects include a monograph on nineteenth-century trauma, and a short story collection and novel.
Alexandra has been an invited panellist on BBC Radio 4's 'In Our Time', ran Aberdeen's headline event for the first UK Being Human Festival of the Humanities (‘Will Self in Conversation with Alexandra Lewis’), and has given talks and workshops at a range of events including Brontë bicentenary lectures in Cairo and Athens and a recent Writing and Wellness Retreat at Haworth. She was co-investigator, alongside Professor Hazel Hutchison, on a Royal Society of Edinburgh cross-institutional multi-disciplinary research grant, ‘Women, Science, Narrative’, and has supervised funded PhDs as part of the Aberdeen-Curtin Alliance, an external international partnership.
She serves on the Advisory Board for the Central Online Victorian Educator (COVE) and on the Executive Committees of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA).
Alexandra's poetry and fiction appear in Causeway/Cabhsair; The Interpreter's House; Waymaking: An Anthology of Women’s Adventure Writing, Poetry and Art; Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature; Axon: Creative Explorations and Southerly.
Qualifications
- Doctor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge - UK
- Bachelor of Arts Honours Class I, University of Sydney
Keywords
- • Australian literature
- • Creative writing
- • Fiction
- • Fin-de-siècle literature
- • History of medicine, psychology, & the emotions
- • Life writing
- • Literature and science 1800 to present
- • Memory studies
- • Neo-Victorian fiction
- • Short fiction
- • The Brontës and George Eliot
- • Trauma narratives, C19th to the present
- • Travel writing
- • Twentieth-century women’s writing
- • Victorian literature and culture
Fields of Research
Code | Description | Percentage |
---|---|---|
470504 | British and Irish literature | 40 |
360201 | Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting) | 60 |
Professional Experience
UON Appointment
Title | Organisation / Department |
---|---|
Senior Lecturer | University of Newcastle School of Humanities, Creative Ind and Social Sci Australia |
Publications
For publications that are currently unpublished or in-press, details are shown in italics.
Book (4 outputs)
Year | Citation | Altmetrics | Link |
---|---|---|---|
2021 | Johnson J, Lewis A, Sllipery, Slimy, Feathered and Furred, 168 (2021) | ||
2021 | Lewis A, Kani S, Memory in Lockdown: Creative Nonfiction, Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle, 120 (2021) | ||
2019 | Brontë E, Wuthering Heights: Fifth Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton, New York and London, 448 (2019) | ||
Show 1 more book |
Chapter (13 outputs)
Year | Citation | Altmetrics | Link | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2021 | Lewis A, 'Memory in Lockdown: Introduction', Memory in Lockdown: Creative Nonfiction, Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle 1-6 (2021) | |||||||
2021 | Lewis A, 'Drop Everything! A Koala Story by Alexandra Lewis, Illustrated by Liz Anelli', Slippery, Slimy, Feathered and Furred, Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle 135-146 (2021) | |||||||
2021 | Lewis A, 'Drop Everything! A Koala Story by Alexandra Lewis, Illustrated by Liz Anelli', Slippery, Slimy, Feathered and Furred, Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle 135-146 (2021) | |||||||
2019 |
Lewis A, 'Introduction: Human Subjects: Reimagining the Brontës for Twenty-First-Century Scholarship', The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination, Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 1-26 (2019) [B1]
|
Nova | ||||||
2019 |
Lewis A, 'Being Human: De-Gendering Mental Anxiety; or Hysteria, Hypochondriasis and Traumatic Memory in Charlotte Brontë s Villette', The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 84-106 (2019) [B1]
|
Nova | ||||||
2017 |
Lewis A, 'The Ethics of Appropriation; Or, the mere spectre of Jane Eyre: Emma Tennant s Thornfield Hall, Jasper Fforde s The Eyre Affair and Gail Jones s Sixty Lights', Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK (2017) [B1]
|
|||||||
2015 |
Lewis A, 'Stagnation of air and mind: Picturing trauma and miasma in Charlotte Brontë'S Villette', Picturing Women's Health 59-76 (2015)
|
|||||||
Show 10 more chapters |
Journal article (10 outputs)
Year | Citation | Altmetrics | Link | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2020 |
Lewis A, 'Satisfied with such a life', Victorians, 138 303-315 (2020) This neo-Victorian short story offers a perspective ¿from below¿ on the miserable first marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the eponymous tenant of Wildfell Hall. Presented in the form ... [more] This neo-Victorian short story offers a perspective ¿from below¿ on the miserable first marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the eponymous tenant of Wildfell Hall. Presented in the form of a confidential communication from servant Rachel to her co-worker Benson, the story examines the dangers to which women subject themselves when they marry. Despite her loyalty, Rachel is acutely aware of the ways Helen minimizes and underestimates her worth and that of other members of the servant class. It is the unlettered Rachel who better understands what Helen risks in her engagement to Gilbert Markham, and who perceives the dangers, for women, of ¿want[ing] too little and forget[ting] too much.¿
|
||||
2018 |
Lewis A, 'For the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it', Victorians, 134 308-319 (2018) [C1]
|
||||
2017 | Lewis A, 'Wells of Sorrow', Southerly, 77 34-47 (2017) | ||||
2012 |
Lewis A, 'Women in the Victorian literary marketplace', Women, 23 235-238 (2012)
|
||||
2011 | Lewis A, 'THE FEELING OF READING Affective experience and Victorian literature', TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, 27-27 (2011) | ||||
Show 7 more journal articles |
Creative Work (4 outputs)
Year | Citation | Altmetrics | Link |
---|---|---|---|
2018 | Lewis A, Laughing At Injuries (Isabella S Erasure) (2018) | ||
2018 | Lewis A, This Ocean Sings, UK (2018) | ||
2017 | Lewis A, The Snarl, The Interpreter's House (2017) | ||
Show 1 more creative work |
Other (3 outputs)
Year | Citation | Altmetrics | Link |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | Lewis A, 'Invited respondent, Prof. Gillian Beer, Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human , US National Humanities Center Forum, onthehuman.org (29 June 2010).', (2010) | ||
2009 | Lewis A, 'Past versus Present: A Report on the BAVS/NAVSA Conference, Cambridge, UK, 2009', : The British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) (2009) | ||
2009 | Lewis A, 'Past versus Present (Literature Compass: Navigating Literary Studies)', : Literature Compass (2009) |
Research Supervision
Number of supervisions
Current Supervision
Commenced | Level of Study | Research Title | Program | Supervisor Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
2024 | PhD | Human, Non-Human and More-Than Human Connections in the Anthropocene: Proposing Hope as an Embodied Reconnection With Nature and Self | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2022 | PhD | Voyeurs in the Flames: A Novella and Exegesis | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Principal Supervisor |
2022 | PhD | Imago: A Novel with Exegesis (Contemporary Australian Crime Fiction) | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Principal Supervisor |
2021 | PhD | Val Silver and the Dragon’s Secret: Normalising Nonbinary Identity in Australian Middle Grade Fantasy Literature | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Principal Supervisor |
2021 | PhD | It Tells Me You Have Gone On, Singing: Writing the Hunter River / Coquun Through Decay and Transformation | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2021 | PhD | Experiments and Experiences of Narrative Cause and Effect | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Principal Supervisor |
2020 | PhD | The Phenomenology of Place in a Postcolonial Text: Imaginings, Development and Identity in the Poetry of Place | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2019 | PhD | The Pass: The Life, Death and Afterlife of Caroline Collits | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2018 | PhD | A Theory of Displacement | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2018 | PhD | Postirony and its Trajectory: Circumventing Postmodernism | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2017 | PhD | "Writing for Children is Usually Purposeful, its Intention Being to Foster in the Child Reader a Positive Apperception of Some Socio-Cultural Values Which, it is Assumed, are Shared by Author and Audience" (Stephens, 3) | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
Past Supervision
Year | Level of Study | Research Title | Program | Supervisor Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
2023 | PhD | Finding "a Fortune - / Exterior - to Time -": Engaging with Emily Dickinson's Poetry as a Form of Poetry Journal | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2023 | PhD | Masculinity and the Representations of Men in Kate Chopin’s Fiction | PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle | Co-Supervisor |
2017 | PhD | Urban Space and the Theatrical Imagination: The Representation of London in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Popular Novel (1852-1865) | Literature, University of Aberdeen | Principal Supervisor |
2016 | PhD | Wedgewood: A Novel with Exegesis (Creative Writing PhD) | Literature, University of Aberdeen | Co-Supervisor |
2014 | PhD | The Non-Event, the Event, and Techniques of Representation in the Novels of Frances Burney | Literature, University of Aberdeen | Co-Supervisor |
Dr Alexandra Lewis
Position
Senior Lecturer
School of Humanities, Creative Ind and Social Sci
College of Human and Social Futures