Current and Recent Research Students
Dr Alice Bennett
Contact (email at alice.bennett@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
After studying for a BA in English at the University of Warwick and receiving an MA in Issues in Modern Culture from UCL, I came to study for my PhD at Durham under the supervision of Pat Waugh. My doctoral thesis was titled Narrative and the Afterlife in Modern Fiction and I completed my viva successfully in March 2009. I have taught in the English Studies department since 2006, and currently teach Introduction to Drama, Introduction to the Novel, and Literature of the Modern Period.
My thesis explored the reasons why the afterlife is such a potent cultural concept today, and how the properties of the afterlife become a tool for examining the capacities and conventions of narrative in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Narratives, and particularly novels, are structured in ways which seem to demand an afterlife perspective, yet, at the same time, the novel is bound up with a history of realism, and with attempts to present our world as it is. My work examined a wide range of problems within narrative theory (including tense, temporality, person, plot, and point of view) taking all its cues from experimental narratives about the afterlife from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Alongside this, there is a rich vein of cultural change - in growing secularism, a far-reaching awareness of 'coming after' in philosophy and culture, new interest in haunting and revenants and, most recently, new kinds of atheism - which make this a timely and interesting subject for consideration.
My research interests lie in narrative theory and contemporary fiction, and I have continued to work in these areas since receiving my doctorate. I have had recent work published in Textual Practice and in the 'Writing and Immortality' issue of The Oxford Literary Review. Since completing my thesis, I have been extending my interests to other forms of writing, giving papers on the narrative aspects of micro-blogging and text adventure games in the context of my research on the afterlife. I am also guest-editing a special issue of the Durham Institute of Advanced Studies' postgraduate journal, Kaleidoscope, on 'Afterlives', in response to the conference held at Durham last Autumn.
