Rate My Professor Alistair Fox

Emeritus Professor Alistair Fox, holding an MA from the University of Canterbury and a PhD from the University of Western Ontario, is a prominent scholar in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago. His long career at the institution includes serving as Professor of English, Director of the Centre for Research on National Identity, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Division of Humanities. Fox has contributed extensively to teaching and academic leadership, with his office located at 1N1, First Floor, Arts Building, Albany Street, Dunedin.

Fox's expertise spans early modern English literature, Renaissance humanism, literature and politics in the Reformation period, contemporary New Zealand literature and culture including film, postcolonial literature, and theory of literary and cinematic representation. His current research focuses on the theory of fictive representation in film and literature, authorship and the creative process, issues of gender and genre, adaptation, and national identities. He has delivered invited presentations, such as 'Une approche génético-biographique: L'œuvre Pier Paolo Pasolini' at the Chaire Roger Odin Seminar Series, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, in 2020.

Among his key publications are the biography Peter Cleverley: Between Transience and Eternity (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2025); the chapter 'Negative emotions in the light of neuropsychoanalysis: The generative matrix of Witi Ihimaera's multigenerational saga' in The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature (Routledge, 2025); Melodrama, Masculinity and International Art Cinema (Anthem Press, 2022); and as translator with Anne Gillain, Totally Truffaut: 23 Films for Understanding the Man and the Filmmaker (Oxford University Press, 2021). Earlier forthcoming works included Coming of Age in New Zealand: Genre, Gender, and Adaptation in a National Cinema and Truffaut on Cinema (2017). His scholarship bridges literature and cinema, particularly in postcolonial and national contexts.