Dr Alex Tankard
Lecturer in English Literature
Alex Tankard is Lecturer in English Literature, specialising in nineteenth-century medicine, disability and gender studies.
She completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool with a thesis on representations of men with tuberculosis in nineteenth-century culture.
Alex has experience teaching on:
- Studying Literature
- Approaches to Literature
- Romantic Literature
- Gothic Literature
- Nineteenth-Century Culture
- MA Research Skills
Research interests
Nineteenth-century medicine and disabled identity; queer and disability representation in literature and on screen; fanfiction; asexuality.
Current research
Alex is currently writing a book on asexual representation in literature and popular culture, from Victorian novels to contemporary TV drama.
TV appearance
‘Scandal and Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley’ (Academy7 Productions/ BBC4), March 2020.
Publications
Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
‘“There was something very peculiar about Doc…”: Deciphering Queer Intimacy in Representations of Doc Holliday’, Journal of American Nineteenth-Century History (December 2014).
‘Killer Consumptive in the Wild West: the Posthumous Decline of Doc Holliday’, in Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability, ed. by David Bolt (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 26-37.
‘“He laughed at death, while courting its embrace”: Reconstructing Doc Holliday’s Experience of Illness’, Journal of the Wild West History Association, 6:4 (2013), pp. 3-14.
‘The Victorian Consumptive in Disability Studies’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5 (2011), pp. 17-34.
‘“If I am not grotesque I am nothing”: Aubrey Beardsley and Disabled Identities in Conflict’, in Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 93-108.
‘Emasculation, Eugenics, and the Consumptive Voyeur in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Story of a Nobody(1893)’, Critical Survey, 20 (2008), pp. 61-78.
Journalism and reviews
‘“Lazarus Rising” in Supernatural: a Perfect Horror Gem’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers.
‘Robot-Satan in Alien: Covenant’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers.
Review of Rosie Forrest, Ghost Box Evolution in Cadillac, Michigan (Brookline, Massachusetts: Rose Metal Press, 2015), in Flash: the International Short Story Magazine, 9: 1 (2016), pp. 101-102.
Review of David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson (eds.), The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2012), in Disability and Society, 29: 10 (2014), pp. 1691-1693.
‘Zombies at the OK Corral: Unusual Retellings of the Tombstone Story’ Tombstone Times, November 2013 [a magazine for tourists in Arizona, US].
Reviews for Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: a Biography (1998; London: Pallas Athene, 2011) and Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley (1909; London: Pallas Athene, 2011), in The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, 20: 1 (2012), pp. 36-38.
‘Living Dead in Tombstone: (Mis)representations of Doc Holliday’s Tuberculosis’, Tombstone Times, October 2011.
Work in progress/ under review
‘“There was something very peculiar about Doc…’: Deciphering Queer Intimacy in Representations of Doc Holliday’
- BA (English and Philosophy)
- MA (Victorian Literature)
- PhD (English Literature)