Professor Alison Light
I am a full-time writer and researcher who has moved in and out of a number of academic posts over the years – in Brighton, London, Sheffield and Newcastle. After a degree in English at Cambridge, I worked at the BBC as a studio manager, then gained an MA and PhD at Sussex University. As well as academic articles, I have written freelance journalism for the press over the years (including The Guardian, Sight and Sound, and the London Review of Books) and four books to date (see below). I also spent several years setting up the Raphael Samuel History Centre and Archive in London which is open to the public and for historians of every stripe. As a Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam I helped establish a special collection of research materials: ‘Readerships and Literary Cultures 1900-1950’, and at Edinburgh, with colleagues in the English Department, I am developing course-work in ‘life-writing’. I’ve spoken at a number of universities about my work (and at literary festivals) and maintain a link with the Sorbonne and EHSS in Paris, and the European University Institute in Florence.
When I came to live in Oxford I was delighted to become part of Pembroke, initially as a Senior Associate via TORCH (the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities), then as a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow, and now as an Honorary Fellow, with a foot in both camps of History and English. I don’t teach any more but occasionally give lectures and enjoy the chance to talk informally with colleagues and students about their projects. I’ve also worked in radio and television a fair amount, broadcasting chiefly on issues to do with modern British cultural history and literature – usually as a ‘talking head’. In 2012 I acted as the main consultant on a BBC 2 series, ‘The Real Servants’, meant in part as an antidote to Downton Abbey. My last book, A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation won the PEN Ackerley prize for literary autobiography. In 2021 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
I am currently writing a memoir about growing up in postwar Britain. How do you 'historicise yourself?' - put your 'self ' into history?
Books:
2019: A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation (Fig Tree/Penguin Press. This won the PEN Ackerley prize for literary autobiography 2020.
2014 Common People: The History of an English Family (Fig Tree/Penguin Press; Chicago University Press, 2015) Common People was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize in Non-Fiction.
2007 Mrs Woolf and the Servants, (Fig Tree/Penguin Press; Bloomsbury USA 2008) Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; runner up for the Longman/History Today prize.
1991 Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars, (Routledge)
I am currently the co-editor of a Edinburgh University Press series, The Feminist Library: Essays in Cultural Criticism. My own volume, Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-writing kicks off the series in November 2021.
Editions:
2007 The Lost World of British Communism (essays by the historian, Raphael Samuel), with Preface, (Verso).
2000 Flush by Virginia Woolf, with introduction and notes (Penguin Classics)
1998 Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (essays by the historian, Raphael Samuel), with biographical preface, introduction and extensive notes, (Verso).
Chapters in Books
2017, ‘A Visit to the Dead: Genealogy and the Historian’, in History Matters: History After Hobsbawm, eds. J.Arnold et al (Oxford University Press)
2014, ‘Pie in the Sky’, in Virginia Woolf and December 1910, ed., M. Makiko-Pinkney, (Illuminati Press)
2004 ‘Biography and Autobiography since 1970’, Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, eds.,P. Nicholls and L. Marcus, (Cambridge University Press)
Articles in Refereed Journals:
2019 ‘Writing Everyday Lives’, Kenyon Review (Nov/Dec)
2017 ‘Between Private and Public : Writing a Memoir’, History Workshop Journal, 83, Spring
2013 ‘Le Siecle Instable?’, Revue D’Histoire du XIXeme Siecle, no. 47, 2
2009 ‘A Child’s Sense of the Past’, New Formations, no.67, Summer
Reviews/journalism:
2020 lead review of by Madeleine Bunting, Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care, The Guardian, October 9th
2020 ‘The General Tone is Purple: Where the Poor Lived’, review of Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps, London Review of Books, July 2nd
2020, lead review of Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, The Guardian, May 1st.
2020 ‘Behind the Green Baize Door’, review of Laura Schwartz, Feminism and Domestic Labour, London Review of Books, March 5th.
Professor Alison Light
I am a full-time writer and researcher who has moved in and out of a number of academic posts over the years – in Brighton, London, Sheffield and Newcastle. After a degree in English at Cambridge, I worked at the BBC as a studio manager, then gained an MA and PhD at Sussex University. As well as academic articles, I have written freelance journalism for the press over the years (including The Guardian, Sight and Sound, and the London Review of Books) and four books to date (see below). I also spent several years setting up the Raphael Samuel History Centre and Archive in London which is open to the public and for historians of every stripe. As a Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam I helped establish a special collection of research materials: ‘Readerships and Literary Cultures 1900-1950’, and at Edinburgh, with colleagues in the English Department, I am developing course-work in ‘life-writing’. I’ve spoken at a number of universities about my work (and at literary festivals) and maintain a link with the Sorbonne and EHSS in Paris, and the European University Institute in Florence.
When I came to live in Oxford I was delighted to become part of Pembroke, initially as a Senior Associate via TORCH (the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities), then as a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow, and now as an Honorary Fellow, with a foot in both camps of History and English. I don’t teach any more but occasionally give lectures and enjoy the chance to talk informally with colleagues and students about their projects. I’ve also worked in radio and television a fair amount, broadcasting chiefly on issues to do with modern British cultural history and literature – usually as a ‘talking head’. In 2012 I acted as the main consultant on a BBC 2 series, ‘The Real Servants’, meant in part as an antidote to Downton Abbey. My last book, A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation won the PEN Ackerley prize for literary autobiography. In 2021 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
I am currently writing a memoir about growing up in postwar Britain. How do you 'historicise yourself?' - put your 'self ' into history?
Books:
2019: A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation (Fig Tree/Penguin Press. This won the PEN Ackerley prize for literary autobiography 2020.
2014 Common People: The History of an English Family (Fig Tree/Penguin Press; Chicago University Press, 2015) Common People was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize in Non-Fiction.
2007 Mrs Woolf and the Servants, (Fig Tree/Penguin Press; Bloomsbury USA 2008) Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; runner up for the Longman/History Today prize.
1991 Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars, (Routledge)
I am currently the co-editor of a Edinburgh University Press series, The Feminist Library: Essays in Cultural Criticism. My own volume, Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-writing kicks off the series in November 2021.
Editions:
2007 The Lost World of British Communism (essays by the historian, Raphael Samuel), with Preface, (Verso).
2000 Flush by Virginia Woolf, with introduction and notes (Penguin Classics)
1998 Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (essays by the historian, Raphael Samuel), with biographical preface, introduction and extensive notes, (Verso).
Chapters in Books
2017, ‘A Visit to the Dead: Genealogy and the Historian’, in History Matters: History After Hobsbawm, eds. J.Arnold et al (Oxford University Press)
2014, ‘Pie in the Sky’, in Virginia Woolf and December 1910, ed., M. Makiko-Pinkney, (Illuminati Press)
2004 ‘Biography and Autobiography since 1970’, Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, eds.,P. Nicholls and L. Marcus, (Cambridge University Press)
Articles in Refereed Journals:
2019 ‘Writing Everyday Lives’, Kenyon Review (Nov/Dec)
2017 ‘Between Private and Public : Writing a Memoir’, History Workshop Journal, 83, Spring
2013 ‘Le Siecle Instable?’, Revue D’Histoire du XIXeme Siecle, no. 47, 2
2009 ‘A Child’s Sense of the Past’, New Formations, no.67, Summer
Reviews/journalism:
2020 lead review of by Madeleine Bunting, Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care, The Guardian, October 9th
2020 ‘The General Tone is Purple: Where the Poor Lived’, review of Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps, London Review of Books, July 2nd
2020, lead review of Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, The Guardian, May 1st.
2020 ‘Behind the Green Baize Door’, review of Laura Schwartz, Feminism and Domestic Labour, London Review of Books, March 5th.