Alexandra Lawrie

Dr. Lawrie completed her undergraduate degree in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2008, and her MSc in Literature and Modernity the following year. She completed her PhD (on the rise of English in extramural institutions during the fin de siècle) in March 2012. She was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in 2012-13, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in 2013-14.

Dr. Lawrie’s primary research interests are in intellectual history, Edwardian literature, and pedagogical history - specifically the rise of English in institutional and extramural environments from the 1730s until the present day. Other particular areas of interest include literature of the Scottish Enlightenment, Victorian novel theory, "middlebrow" publishing, interwar British fiction and the BBC, history of reading and readerships, late-Victorian and Edwardian literary journalism, modernist literature, and contemporary British and American fiction.

Dr. Lawrie's current project focuses on the content and impact of BBC wireless broadcasts, publications, and adult education activities relating to literature between 1922 and 1953. Specific areas of research include the programme and series files at the BBC Written Archives Centre; the auxiliaries of wireless broadcasting, such as educational publications, formal study courses, and the Radio Times and the Listener; and the BBC's relationship both to modernism and to the development of a "middlebrow" culture.

Utopian Fiction (3rd-year option course)

Modern American Novel (4th-year core course)

Twenty-First-Century Fiction (4th-year option course)