Dr Alexandra Lewis

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 and an edited collection on The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge University Press). 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 Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (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
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Publications

For publications that are currently unpublished or in-press, details are shown in italics.


Book (6 outputs)

Year Citation Altmetrics Link
2024 Water #2, second Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Sydney (2024)
2023 Water, Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Sydney (2023)
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)
2019 , 'The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination' (2019)
DOI 10.1017/9781316651063
Citations Scopus - 7
Show 3 more books

Chapter (12 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)
2019 Lewis A, 'Introduction - Human Subjects Reimagining the Brontës for Twenty-First-Century Scholarship', 1-26 (2019) [B1]
DOI 10.1017/9781316651063
2019 Lewis A, 'Being Human: De-Gendering Mental Anxiety; or Hysteria, Hypochondriasis and Traumatic Memory in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette', 84-106 (2019) [B1]
DOI 10.1017/9781316651063
Citations Scopus - 2
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]
DOI 10.1017/9781316651063.001
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' (2017) [B1]
DOI 10.7228/manchester/9781784992460.003.0010
Citations Scopus - 5
2016 Lewis A, ''Supposed to be very calm generally': Anger, Narrative and Unaccountable Sounds in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre', Feminist Moments, Bloomsbury, London 67-74 (2016)
2015 Lewis A, 'Psychology and Psychiatry', Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
2014 Lewis A, 'Stagnation of Air and Mind: Picturing Trauma and Miasma in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette', 59-76 (2014)
Citations Scopus - 2
2012 Lewis A, 'Current Trends in Brontë Criticism and Scholarship', The Brontës in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 198-206 (2012)
2010 Lewis A, 'Memory Possessed: Trauma and Pathologies of Remembrance in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights', Acts of Memory: The Victorians and Beyond, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK 35-53 (2010)
2010 Lewis A, 'Telling the Story / Breaking the Boundaries: Metafiction and the Enhancement of Children's Literary Development in The Bravest Ever Bear and The Story of the Falling Star', Telling Children's Stories, University of Nebraska Press 100-119 (2010)
Show 9 more chapters

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)
2016 Lewis A, Glucose Miners, Causeway/Cabhsair: Irish and Scottish Writing (2016)
Show 1 more creative work

Journal article (13 outputs)

Year Citation Altmetrics Link
2023 Lewis A, ''Belonging to Water (Maggie's Erasure)'', Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 27 1-2 (2023) [C1]
2023 Lewis A, ''Our Mutual Corpse'', Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 27 3-4 (2023) [C1]
2023 Lewis A, Blythe H, Scholl L, Wilkes J, ''Water: An Introduction'', Water, Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 27 i-iv (2023)
2020 Lewis A, 'Satisfied With Such a Life', Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 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. P... [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."

DOI 10.1353/vct.2020.0011
2018 Lewis A, 'For the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it', Victorians, 134 308-319 (2018) [C1]
DOI 10.1353/vct.2018.0026
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)
DOI 10.1080/09574042.2012.677253
2011 Lewis A, 'Tales of the islanders', TLS, the Times Literary Supplement, 27 (2011)
2011 Lewis A, 'THE FEELING OF READING Affective experience and Victorian literature', TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, 27-27 (2011)
2010 Lewis A, 'Page to Stage: The Brontës in the World of the Arts', Women: A Cultural Review, 21 338-342 (2010)
DOI 10.1080/09574042.2010.488394
2006 Lewis A, 'Grappling with Essential Reality at the Margins of Community: Identity, Alienation and Transcendence in Patrick White's Voss', eSharp, February 2006 (2006)
2006 Lewis A, 'Post-Colonial Literatures and the Ongoing Process of "Writing Back"', Journal of African Literature and Culture (JALC), March 2006 93-116 (2006)
2006 Lewis A, 'In the Event of Censorship, or, Suppressing the Event's Dramatic Impact: Looking Back at John Osborne's Look Back in Anger', antiTHESIS, 16 61-73 (2006)
Show 10 more journal articles

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)
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Research Supervision

Number of supervisions

Completed12
Current1

Current Supervision

Commenced Level of Study Research Title Program Supervisor Type
2018 PhD Postirony and its Trajectory: Circumventing Postmodernism 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
2025 PhD 'Tough' - Masculinities, Violence and Contemporary Australian Fiction PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle Co-Supervisor
2025 PhD Representations of Autistic Protagonists in Young Adult Literature PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle Co-Supervisor
2025 PhD "The Scheme of My Being": A Collection of Poetry and an Accompanying Exegesis PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle Co-Supervisor
2025 PhD Place and Identity in the Evolution of Australian Bush Noir PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle Principal Supervisor
2025 PhD All the Water a Body Can Hold PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle Co-Supervisor
2025 PhD Addicted Adolescents and Covert Code: A Multilinear Approach to Writing About Drug Use in the Novel "Starting Lineup" PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle Principal Supervisor
2024 PhD Val Silver and the Dragon's Secret: Nonbinary Identity in Australian Middle Grade Fantasy Literature PhD (English), College of Human and Social Futures, The University of Newcastle Principal Supervisor
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
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Dr Alexandra Lewis

Position

Senior Lecturer
School of Humanities, Creative Ind and Social Sci
College of Human and Social Futures

Contact Details

Email alexandra.lewis@newcastle.edu.au
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