Alison Peirse

I am Lecturer in Writing for Screen and Stage. I teach students on the undergraduate degrees in Film and Television Production, Interactive Media and Theatre: Writing, Directing and Performance. I have also lectured at Lancaster, Salford, Hull, Northumbria and Leeds Beckett University. My AHRC funded PhD, awarded in 2007, was supervised by Professor Annette Kuhn at the University of Lancaster. I was awarded the PG Cert in Academic Practice and Learning by Northumbria in 2011 and was made a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2013.

My research is now in scriptwriting and story development. I have won a BBC WritersRoom/Ideas Tap competition for my script 'In My Skin', I've been selected for Channel 4's 4Talent scriptwriting strand, and have undertaken playwright training with the High Tide Festival Theatre company at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre. I'm also a script consultant, working with individual writers, independent producers, industry funding bodies and production companies to develop film and television scripts.

My research interests include scriptwriting, story development, horror film, documentary film, film criticism and television studies.

My first monograph, After Dracula: The 1930s Horror Film, was published by I.B. Tauris in late 2013, as was Korean Horror Cinema, the book collection I co-edited for Edinburgh University Press. I have also edited a special horror and cult issue of the journal Asian Cinema (2011) and was the co-organiser of a conference on British Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Television at Northumbria (2011).

I'm writing my my third book, The Talking Dead: British Horror Cinema and Spiritualism (Edinburgh University Press), for which I was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant. In this book, I explore spiritualism (the social practice of communicating with the dead) in relation to British cinema. My book suggests that mediums and seances remain a significant point of unease, not only for the characters in the narrative, but also for the censors, filmmakers and critics alike, and that spiritualism remains a powerful and potent force in British film culture throughout the 20th and 21st century.