
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 |
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) | ||
| 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]
|
Open Research Newcastle | ||||||
| 2019 |
Lewis A, 'Being Human: De-Gendering Mental Anxiety; or Hysteria, Hypochondriasis and Traumatic Memory in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette', 84-106 (2019) [B1]
|
Open Research Newcastle | ||||||
| 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]
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| 2014 |
Lewis A, 'Stagnation of Air and Mind: Picturing Trauma and Miasma in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette', 59-76 (2014)
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| 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) | ||
| 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) | ||||
| 2018 |
Lewis A, 'For the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it', Victorians, 134 308-319 (2018) [C1]
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| 2012 |
Lewis A, 'Women in the Victorian literary marketplace', Women, 23 235-238 (2012)
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| 2011 | Lewis A, 'THE FEELING OF READING Affective experience and Victorian literature', TLS-THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, 27-27 (2011) | ||||
| 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) |
Research Supervision
Number of supervisions
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 |
Dr Alexandra Lewis
Position
Senior Lecturer
School of Humanities, Creative Ind and Social Sci
College of Human and Social Futures
Contact Details
| alexandra.lewis@newcastle.edu.au |




