Alex Tickell

I am a literary historian and critic and my research explores colonial and postcolonial South Asian and Southeast Asian anglophone literary cultures, contemporary fiction and conjunctions of writing and politics. My area of expertise includes urban fiction of contemporary India and work of the Indian author Arundhati Roy. My most recent research monograph, City Fiction of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship, was published by OUP in 2025.

Before joining the Open University in 2011, I taught at the University of York and University of Portsmouth. I studied for a British Academy funded PhD at the University of Leeds, where my thesis explored nationhood and concepts of home in South Asian fiction in English. (My interest in postcolonial and global fiction was sparked by experience working in Egypt and Southeast Asia, and my MA examined the writing of the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz.) I gained a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in 2004. 

At the Open University I am Director of the OU’s Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group (PGLRG) and have worked on module teams across the English qualification pathway. I am currently Moduel Team Chair of the English Literature MA (A893 and A894) and I have chaired The Arts Past and Present (AA100) in presentation as well as having written teaching material for OU modules at levels 2 and 3. More broadly, I have wide-ranging teaching experience in anglophone Postcolonial and World Literatures, American Literature, Popular Fiction and forms of critical theory. As the Director of the PGLRG I have organised numerous research events, seminars and workshops, including yearly postgraduate symposia.

I am a member of the South Asian Literature Association and have served on the editorial boards of scholarly journals in my field, including the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Southeast Asian Review of English and Wasafiri, and I have acted as region editor on The Year’s Work in English. I have been a judge on the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and on the Indian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies essay prize. In 2010 I held a visiting fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford. Between 2020-2023 I was co-curator of the British Library's 'Chinese and British' Exhibition. 

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