Academic staff profiles
Alex ThomsonOutline Biography
After completing his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, Alex Thomson held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, before lecturing at the University of Bristol and the University of Glasgow. He has been a lecturer in the department since January 2006. Between July 1999 and January 2001, he was editor of Edinburgh Review. He also holds an MA (Hons) in English and Scottish Literature from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in English Literature from the University of Sussex.
Research Interests
My main research interests are in 19th and 20th century Scottish literature, and in Critical Theory, particularly the work of Theodor Adorno and of Jacques Derrida. I am currently working on three projects. I am editing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Memories and Portraits for the New Edinburgh Edition of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2013. I am also working on a study, tentatively titled Critical Theory and Democracy, which develops my work on the political implications of the Jacques Derrida’s thought through comparisons with figures such as Jacques Rancière and Etienne Balibar. A longer term project is on the relationship between literature and nationalism in modern Scotland.
I am co-director with Penny Fielding of the Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century project at the University of Edinburgh, and an active participant in the Scottish Network of Modernism Studies. I am co-editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Taking on the Political, with Benjamin Arditi, Andrew Schaap and Jeremy Valentine, and I serve on the Edinburgh University Press Committee.
I would welcome research proposals in any area of modern Scottish Literature, but particularly in twentieth century Scottish fiction and poetry, in Scottish modernism, and in the history of ideas in Scotland. I would also welcome proposals relating to his interests in twentieth century French thought, and in the work of the Frankfurt School, as well as interdisciplinary projects linking literature to philosophy and / or political theory. I am currently supervising projects on:
- T.E. Hulme;
- the idea of the canon in recent literary theory;
- Ian Hamilton Finlay & Edwin Morgan;
- Gael Turnbull and Ian Hamilton Finlay;
- Hamish Henderson;
- Norman McCaig.
Publications
Publications list for Alex Thomson
This article was published on Nov 26, 2012