Dr Jane Alexander
Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing

- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Tel: +44 (0)131 651 7112
- Email: jane.alexander@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
2.45, 50 George Square
- City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 8LH
Availability
Office hour: Wednesday 11am-12
Background
Jane Alexander is a novelist and short story writer. Her first novel The Last Treasure Hunt (Saraband, 2015) was selected as a Waterstones debut of the year; her second novel A User's Guide to Make-Believe (Allison & Busby) was published in January 2020, and her short story collection with accompanying essay, The Flicker Against the Light and Writing the Contemporary Uncanny, was published by Luna Academia in 2021. Her short fiction has won prizes and been widely published. She is the recipient of a Scottish Arts Council New Writers Bursary and a Creative Scotland research award, and in 2016 was awarded a Hawthornden International Writing Retreat Fellowship. Jane joined the department in 2017, and in 2018 she completed a creative writing PhD on the contemporary uncanny in short fiction, funded by Northumbria University. Jane is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Postgraduate teaching
MSc Creative Writing Core Courses 1 & 2. MSc Creative Writing Dissertation.
Edinburgh Futures Institute: Writing Speculative Fiction
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
No
Current PhD students supervised
Robin Brown, This Terrible Silence (a novel) and "The Voice of Literature”: Postcolonial Rejection of Orthodox Narrative Voice in the Work of James Kelman and Amos Tutoula
Nicole Caratas, Untitled (a novel) and Narrativity in Historical Fiction
Alex Penland, Antikythera (a novel) and Protagonist Lenses in the Songs of Achilles and Ilium
Lexi Angelo (Creative Writing: prose fiction)
Current research interests
Jane's research interests include contemporary uncanny fiction; science and technology in fiction; literary genre; interdisciplinary collaborations in creative writing, visual arts and medical humanities.Research activities
- Can Science Save Us?
- Creating Synthetic Biology: Future Imaginaries in Science and Art
- Biopolis: visions of city living through the lenses of biological research
- Cymera Book Festival 2021
- Uncanny Technologies: the body as site of impact
- Being Human festival 2020: New Worlds
- Cymera Book Festival 2020
- Challenging the Narrative
- Three kinds of haunting
-
Writing chronic illness in short fiction: An exploration in practice and reflection
In:
Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 77, pp. 53-70
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
In Yon Green Hill To Dwell
(10 pages)
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
The Flicker Against the Light and Writing the Contemporary Uncanny
(220 pages)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
Corporation Imagen
(352 pages)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
A User's Guide to Make-Believe
(352 pages)
Research output: › Book (Published) -
The Hatayama Code and the question of meaning - resistance and interpretation in short fiction as practice research
(10 pages)
In:
RoundTable, vol. 2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/rt.58
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Dolly: In Disturbing the Beast: The Best of Women’s Weird Fiction
Research output: › Performance (Published) -
“Small Objects” (short story) with accompanying commentary “Are you reading uncomfortably? Second person as an uncanny narrative mode”
In:
Writing in Practice: the journal of creative writing research, vol. 5, pp. 1-18
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
All That Lasts: In Echoes of the City: Edinburgh’s Hidden Stories
Research output: › Performance (Published) -
Candlemaker Row: In Umbrellas of Edinburgh
Research output: › Performance (Published)