Alison Garden is a Senior Lecturer and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. Alison was the first person in the UK from a Literary Studies background to hold a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship within a Literature department; she is also very proud to be the first (and currently only) FLF in the Humanities at Queen’s and in Ireland. She is an inaugural member of Young Academy Ireland; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; and a Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. Alison also sits on the UKRI Future Leaders Fellow Development Network Advisory Group. 

Alison was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow here at Queen's from 2018-2020 and she was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2020. She was appointed to Lecturer at Queen's in 2022 and she was appointed to Senior Lecturer in 2023. Before coming to Queen's, Alison held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-2018) and Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (2015-2016) at University College Dublin. 

Her first book, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016, was published by Liverpool University Press in June 2020 and came out in paperback in 2023. She is currently working on her second monograph, Love Across the Divide: desire and colonial culture in Northern Ireland, 1970-present. She is co-editor of Brian Moore in Context (Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 2023), Rethinking the 1980/81 Hunger Strikes (Irish Review 2020) and The Irish Atlantic (Symbiosis 2015). 

Alison enjoys writing for diverse audiences and her criticism, essays, reviews and interviews have been published in TIME, Aeon, The Tangerine, Al Jazeera, The Irish Times, the Guardian, RTÉ, and elsewhere. She has produced content for the BBC. 

Alison is passionate about supporting Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and demystifying the postdoc experience, and you can find her guides to various postdoc schemes here. She has organised #ECRday2021,  #ECRday2022, and #ECRday2023, a series of online talks exploring academic opportunities after the PhD. Alison is also a member of the Postdoctoral Development Centre Network. 

Alison is a firm believer in the effectiveness of structured writing retreats and was lucky enough to train as a writing retreat facilitator with Professor Rowena Murray. She currently runs a writing group for ECRs and structured writing retreats for Queen's University and Ulster University.

Alison is a literary critic and cultural historian, fascinated by how national narratives intersect with the intimate, everyday realities of people’s lives and the stories we tell about this. She has expertise on Irish literary, cultural and political history; 'the Troubles'; sexuality studies; girlhood; and has particular interests in the histories and cultures of love, romance and sexuality.

Alison's UKRI Future Leaders award is supporting her current research project, ‘Acts of Union: Mixed Marriage in Modern Ireland’. Alison is delighted to be working with a project team that includes the historian Dr Ruth Duffy and their Co-Investigator, Professor Diane Urquhart, Chair of Gender History here at Queen’s University Belfast. Alison is working with the arts and cultural sector to produce an interdisciplinary social and cultural history of mixed marriage, or love across the divide, in modern Ireland. The project will engage with multiple cultural institutions and organisations across the island, including the Belfast-based theatre company Kabosh, and the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), based in Dublin, to help bring her research findings to life.

Alongside this, Alison is writing her second monograph, Love Across the Divide: desire and colonial culture in Northern Ireland, 1970-present. This monograph will be the first study of the pervasive ‘Love Across the Divide’ phenomenon: narratives that feature a frustrated and dangerous romance between lovers from the North’s ostensibly antagonistic communities. Largely overlooked by scholars, this enormously and enduringly popular motif can be found across all literary and cultural forms, from novels, short fiction and poetry, to drama, TV and film. Exploring a range of both canonical and underexplored texts, from 1970 to the present, this cultural history asserts how vitally important, political and revealing such narratives are, as an essential component to making sense of the deeply intimate history of Anglo-Irish relations.

Alison contributes to:

ENG1002: Introduction to Contemporary Fiction.

ENG1001: English in Transition.

ENG2081: Irish Literature.

She also runs the third year option course, ENG3187: Love Across the Divide: Northern Irish Literature and Culture 1968-Present.

With Professor Ramona Wray, Alison is delighted to be supervising Molly Quinn-Leitch's PhD on Shakespeare and Northern Ireland (funded by the Northern Bridge AHRC Doctoral Consortium). 

Alison is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.