Alison Donnell

Alison Donnell is an academic, originally from the United Kingdom. She is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading, where she also founded the research theme "Minority Identities: Rights and Representations". Her primary research field is anglophone postcolonial literature, and she has been published widely on Caribbean and Black British literature. Much of her academic work also focuses questions relating to gender and sexual identities and the intersections between feminism and postcolonialism.

After leaving secondary school she was educated at UWC Atlantic College, and at the same time her parents moved to India. She went on to obtain her bachelor's degree in English and American literature from Warwick University and her PhD from the Centre for Caribbean Studies.

Professor Donnell has been awarded a number of research grants and fellowships, including a visiting Hurst fellowship, Department of English, Washington University and the James M. Osborne Fellowship in English Literature and History, Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In 2013 she was awarded a research fellowship by the AHRC to research sexual citizenship and queerness in the Caribbean, addressing the criminalization and intolerance of homosexuality in the region by contesting heteronormativity rather than homophobia. Donnell's work uses literature to show how sexual pluralism and indeterminacy are part of the Caribbean cultural world. She worked with CAISO, the Caribbean IRN and the IGDS at UWI on a series of public events called Sexualities in the Tent.

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