Professor Alan Sandison

Biography

Born Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Educated at Aberdeen University (MA with First Class Honours in English Literature1958) and Peterhouse, Cambridge (Ph.D. 1962). Lectureships at Univ of Exeter and Durham, Chair of English, Univ Strathclyde, Glasgow. Chair of English at UNE.

Qualifications

MA with First Class Honours in English (Aberdeen 1958)
Lucy Junior Fellow, Peterhouse Cambridge (Ph.D. 1962)

Teaching Areas

Literature in the 17th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries.

Research Interests

Most recently, Modernism in literature and art; the work of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Research Supervision Experience

Many Ph.D students both in the UK and Australia.External Examiner in English for the University of Kuala Lumpur for two years in the late eighties.

Publications

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. (Editor with Introduction), World’s Classics, Oxford UP. 1987, 1998, 2008.

Histories of The Future : Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction. (Co-editor with Robert Dingley) Macmillan Palgrave. 2000.

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism. Macmillan. 1996.

Rudyard Kipling Monograph. Published by Scribners. 1987(?)

The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth-Century and early Twentieth-Century Fiction. Macmillan. 1967.

Many essays on Kipling and Stevenson (eg Stevenson and Proust, Stevenson and Musil) in books on Stevenson. Latest essay : ‘R. L. Stevenson and Aboriginal Art’ which will be published in October 2014 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Stevenson Studies

Related Links

Importation citations: FromThe Oxford History of the British Empire, vol 5, Historiography,1999. Dealing with ‘how generations at home came to receive their conventional wisdom about their Empire abroad’, the editors write: ‘Two approaches dominated until the 1980s: the one, straightforward examinations of how ‘serious’ authors… dealt with non-Western cultures; the other, social-psychological enquiries…into how children’s fiction of empire gave rise to attitudes that support imperial expansion. These kinds of enquiries may be said to have been launched by a single book, Alan Sandison’s The Wheel of Empire… (pp 657-8). (Note: in The Atlantic (Jan/Feb 2008), Professor Paul Kennedy specifically mentions the value of this book and defends my analysis again in a later issue (04/2008) in correspondence in the same journal.)

Further Information

July 2013. Gave major paper at the international Stevenson conference entitled ‘R. L. Stevenson and Aboriginal Art’