Alison is a writer exploring how political conflict enters intimate life—in marriage, family, religion, memory and the everyday. Her work focuses particularly on mixed marriage in Ireland and the ways its effects are felt across generations.

She is a Senior Lecturer and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. Her criticism, essays, reviews and interviews have been published in TIME, Aeon, Al Jazeera, The Irish Times, the Guardian, the Conversation, BBC NI and RTÉ, in addition to academic articles. In 2026, she was runner-up in The Conversation Prize for Writers for an essay on Catholic-Protestant mixed marriage in Northern Ireland.

Her first book, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016, was published in 2020. She is currently finishing her second book, a study of intimacy and political imagination in Ireland during the conflict euphemistically known as ‘the Troubles’.

She is an inaugural member of Young Academy Ireland and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.