Alice Kelly

Alice Kelly is a Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, and the 2021-22 Gardiner Fellow at New-York Historical Society. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literary and cultural history in Britain and America, particularly of the First World War. Alice studied at the universities of Sussex, Reed College, Oxford and Cambridge and has since held research and teaching fellowships at Yale, Oxford and New York University. She is the author of Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (2020) and the editor of Edith Wharton’s war reportage, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (2015), as well as other academic and popular publications. From 2017-2019, Alice organised Cultures and Commemorations of War at the RAI and Imperial War Museum London, an interdisciplinary seminar series funded by a British Academy Rising Stars grant, which examined the practices and politics of war memory across time, featuring speakers including Jeremy Deller and Joe Sacco. In 2020-21, Alice was a Lecturer in American Literature and American Studies at the University of Sussex, and won an award for the quality of her teaching. She regularly writes and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and The Conversation, and has discussed her research on BBC radio and various podcasts.

Alice has been involved with the RAI in various capacities for over a decade, as Masters student (2009-10), the Harmsworth Junior Research Fellow in the History of America and World War One at the RAI and Corpus Christi (2016-2019), Communications and Events Officer (2019-2022), and Fellow. 

Personal website: www.dralicekelly.com
Twitter: @DrAliceKelly

Selected Publications

  • Special Issue on ‘Over There: Rethinking American First World War Literature and Culture’ (First World War Studies, forthcoming)
  • ‘COVID-19, Commemoration and Cultural Memory’, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus (April 2021)
  • Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) (watch events about the book here and here)
  • ‘Mansfield Mobilised: Katherine Mansfield, the Great War and Military Discourse’, Modernist Cultures, Special Issue on Modernism and the First World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), ed. by Andrew Frayn, pp. 78-97
  • ‘Words from Home: Wartime Correspondences’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), ed. by Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Baxter, pp. 77-94
  • Critical Edition of Edith Wharton’s Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
  • ‘“Can one grow used to death?”: Deathbed Scenes in Great War Nurses’ Narratives’, in The Great War: From Memory to History, ed. by Jonathan Vance, Alicia Robinet and Steven Marti (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015), pp. 329-49

Selected Public Scholarship