Alison Garden is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. From 2018-2020, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow here at Queen's University Belfast. From 2016-2018, Alison was an Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, where she was previously a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Institute (2015-2016). Prior to this, she was a Visiting Scholar in American Studies at Northumbria University and Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. Alison is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Her first book, The Afterlives of Roger Casement,1899-2016 was published with Liverpool University Press in 2020. She is currently working on her second monograph. She has published widely for academic and public audiences. 

She recently worked with BBC NI  to put together a series of short programmes on four novels exploring the dangerous thrill of illicit love during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Produced with Jason Martin as part of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped Our World’ project, these went live on the BBC website on 9th May 2020. You can access these here.

Alison's current research project explores the theme of 'Love Across the Divide' in Literautre and Culture from the north of Ireland from 1968-present. There is a long tradition of depicting Ireland’s difficult relationship with Britain as a frustrated and dangerous romance between lovers from ‘opposing sides’. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, as the euphemistically named ‘Troubles’ escalated in violence and terror, these types of stories became increasingly common.

Looking at a range of poems, novels, plays, films and TV programmes, this project asks why the trope is so prevalent; how we might understand it; and why no one has taken these love stories seriously before now. As we approach the centenary of Partition and the prospect of a return to a post-Brexit hard border, these questions are more timely and urgent than ever. 

More broadly, Alison's interdisciplinary research engages with the literature and culture of the long twentieth century, sitting at the critical intersection between sexuality studies, memory studies and postcolonial theory. She has particular interests in: migration, diaspora and the postcolonial Atlantic; haunting, intertextuality and memory; and the afterlives of (bio)political violence.

Alison contributes to:

ENG1002: Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (first year undergraduate class);

ENG2081: Irish Literature (second year undergraduate class);

ENG7305: Irish Poetry (MA class)

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

Alison is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.