Dr Alex Pavey
Researcher Development Training Officer
University of Surrey Doctoral College

I am a training officer for the Researcher Development Programme at the University of Surrey, which provides support and training for postgraduate research students and research staff across the University. I’m particularly interested in supporting interdisciplinary research, ECRs, and part-time researchers.

Prior to this I was a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, working on the Supernatural Cities project – an interdisciplinary network of humanities and social science scholars of urban environments and the supernatural. This included serving as web editor for the Supernatural Cities website, a site which I designed and maintained. I also taught several units on the History undergraduate programme.

My doctoral research, undertaken part-time in the Department of English at UCL, focused on the culture and history of Los Angeles, examining both genre texts (detective fiction, the police novel and film noir) and African-American literature and cinema. It was particularly concerned with the psychology and mobility of individual protagonists as they navigate the city’s complex topography – its diverse neighbourhoods, jurisdictional borders, and racial and social boundaries. I successfully defended my thesis, Crime, Space and Disorientation in the Literature and Cinema of Los Angeles, in 2017.

More broadly, my research interests lie in twentieth-century literature and film, urban theory, mobility studies and the history of criminalistics, and I have articles published or under contract on Raymond Chandler, David Lynch, Aldous Huxley and Henri Bergson.

This site began as a blog documenting the progress of my PhD research during its latter stages. Having successfully completed my PhD, the site has evolved into both a space for reflection, and an opportunity to record my broader research activities. Thanks for visiting!

If you want to get in touch, you can use the contact form below or find me on Twitter: @alexpavey.