Professor Alexandra Harris

• DPhil University of Oxford
• MA Courtauld Institute of Art
• BA University of Oxford

I studied English at Oxford, European art at the Courtauld Institute, and then (after a very happy time in the drawings department at Christie’s) I wrote my doctoral thesis at Oxford on modernism and tradition in the 1930s and 40s. I began my academic career as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool in 2007 and was promoted to a personal chair in 2015. I came to Birmingham in 2017 to take up a Professorial Fellowship in English.

I am currently on Leverhulme-funded research leave but I contribute lectures and seminars to modules at UG and MA level, especially on modernist subjects.

I am interested in work on place and locality; literature in relation to art, architecture and landscape; seasonality and ceremony; literary inheritance across time; twentieth-century British art and literature.

Much of my research has been focussed on Modernism, especially the work of Virginia Woolf, but I have written about literature from the tenth century to the present and am always interested in forms of continuity and revision across time.

I review books in the national press and present programmes on arts subjects for BBC Radio 3 and 4.

As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature I was a judge for the 2017 Ondaatje Prize and am currently on the panel selecting 40 new RSL Fellows under the age of 40.