Allyson Stack

Senior Lecturer

Biography

Background

Allyson Stack was born and raised in Philadelphia and has also lived in New York City, Arizona, and Edinburgh. She holds a BA from Yale, an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD in Literature from the University of Edinburgh, and she has taught writing and literature on both sides of the Atlantic.

Her short stories have appeared in print and electronic journals throughout the United States, Britain, and Ireland, and her fiction has been featured on National Public Radio and fourthirtythree Audio Magazine.  She has received the AWP National Program Director’s Prize for her issue of ALLIGATOR JUIPER, and her story 'The Front' was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.  Her article 'Culture, Cognition, and Jean Laplanche's Engimatic Signifier' was recently included in SEDUCTIONS AND ENIGMAS: LAPLANCHE, THEORY, CULTURE (Lawrence & Wishart, 2014) and her novel UNDER THE HEARTLESS BLUE was published in June, 2016 by Freight Books. 

She is currently working on a second novel titled ALL THAT'S LEFT UNSAID as well as a scholarly article on the apostrophic mode in Willa Cather's O PIONEERS!. 

Undergraduate teaching

  • Creative Writing Prose
  • Critical Practice: Prose

Postgraduate teaching

  • Acts of Storytelling: Narrator, Text, and Audience
  • Explorations in Postmodernism: Postmodern Fictions
  • Exploring the Novel

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Open to inquiries from potential doctoral candidates in literature whose projects aim to examine American fiction in the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly the work of Edith Wharton or Willa Cather.  Also open to doctoral projects involve psychoanalytic theory, especailly the work of Jean Laplanche.  Not currently open to inquiries for Creative Writing PhDs. 

Current PhD students supervised

Jessie Widner - Female Imaginary in Contemporary Fiction

Emma Sullivan - Comedy and Extreme Figurations in Contemporary American Storytelling

Juliet Conway - The Figure of the Flirt in late 19th- early 20th century American Fiction

Mohammed Mahmoud - Repetition in Muriel Spark

Zack Abrams -  Creative Writing PhD

Claire O'Connor - Creative Writing PhD

Past PhD students supervised

Katie Craig - PhD in Creative Writing

Greg Whelan - PhD in Creative Writing

Dan Shand - PhD in Creative Writing

Florence Vincent - PhD in Creative Writing

Research summary

Allyson's research interests include:

  • U.S. fiction in the 19th and 20th centuries
  • expatriate American writers
  • the novel as a form
  • Contemporary fiction
  • feminist and psychoanalytic theory--particularly the work of Jean Laplanche and Luce Irigaray

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