Professor Alexandra Harris

Professor Alexandra Harris

Department of English Literature
Birmingham Professorial Fellow

Contact details

Email
a.harris.2@bham.ac.uk

I enjoy thinking and writing about British art and literature of all periods, especially in relation to landscape, locality and the presence of the past. I am the author of ‘Romantic Moderns’ and ‘Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies’, and my current projects include work on Virginia Woolf; seasonal ceremony and the marking of time; antiquarianism and local history; modern readings of literature from the eighteenth century and before. 

Qualifications

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

Biography

I studied English at Oxford, European art at the Courtauld Institute, and then (after a very happy time in the drawings department at Christie鈥檚) 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.

Teaching

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.

Postgraduate supervision

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.

Research

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.

Other activities

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. 

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Harris, A 2024, . Faber & Faber, London. <>

Harris, A 2019, . Little Toller Books, Dorset.

Article

Harris, A 2018, '', The Cowper and Newton Journal, vol. 8.

Harris, A 2018, '', British Art Studies, vol. 10.

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Harris, A 2022, . in P Bullard (ed.), A History of English Georgic Writing. 1 edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57-78.

Chapter

Harris, A 2023, . in What Is It That Will Last? : Land and Tidal Art of Julie Brook. 1 edn, Lund Humphries, London, pp. 37-46. <>

Harris, A 2022, . in Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water. 1 edn, Pallant House Gallery, pp. 92-97. <>

Harris, A 2022, . in J Baring (ed.), Revisiting Modern British Art. Lund Humphries, London, pp. 25-34. <>

Harris, A 2021, . in N Allen & F Stafford (eds), Archipelago : A Reader. 1 edn, Lilliput Press, Dublin, pp. 358-365. <>

Harris, A 2020, . in K Kennedy & H Lee (eds), The Lives of Houses. Princeton University Press.

Harris, A 2019, . in A McNeillie (ed.), Archipelago 12. Archipelago, vol. 12, Clutag Press, pp. 57-64. <>

Harris, A 2019, . in Ivon Hitchens: Space through Colour. Pallant House Gallery.

Foreword/postscript

Harris, A 2022, . in R Blythe (ed.), Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside. 1 edn, John Murray, London, pp. 47-48. <>

Harris, A 2020, . in The Forward Book of Poetry 2021. Faber & Faber.

Other chapter contribution

Harris, A 2018, . in Dennis Creffield: Encounters. Waterhouse & Dodd, London.