Alison Garden is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast, working on a social and cultural history of mixed marriage in modern Ireland. From 2018-2020 she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. From 2016-2018, she 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 from 2015-2016. In 2015, she was a Visiting Scholar in American Studies at Northumbria University and Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She completed her Ph.D., funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the University of Edinburgh in 2015. She has degrees from King’s College London and the University of Edinburgh. Alison is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Alison’s first book, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016, was published with Liverpool University Press in 2020. She is co-editor of ‘Brian Moore in Context’ (Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 2023), ‘Rethinking the 1980/81 Hunger Strikes’ (Irish Review 2020) and ‘The Irish Atlantic’ (Symbiosis 2015).

A literary critic and cultural historian, Alison is fascinated by how national narratives intersect with the intimate, everyday realities of people’s lives and the stories we tell about this. She has expertise on Irish literary, cultural and political history; ‘the Troubles’; sexuality studies; girlhood; and has particular interests in the histories and cultures of love, romance and sexuality.

Alison is passionate about supporting Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and demystifying the postdoc experience, and you can find her guides to various postdoc schemes here. In July 2021, she hosted #ECRday2021, a day of online talks exploring academic opportunities after the PhD. You can catch up with the videos from the day here.

Alison is a firm believer in the effectiveness of structured writing retreats and was lucky enough to train as a writing retreat facilitator with Professor Rowena Murray. She currently runs an online writing group for ECRs and the occasional in-person writing retreat (lockdowns permitting, of course).