Alice Bennett

Alice Bennett is an Associate Professor in British Literature and Culture at the University of Bergen (UiB), affiliated with the Department of Foreign Languages. Previously, she held positions at Liverpool Hope University (as Senior Lecturer) and Durham University in the UK. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and culture, with specialization in health humanities, attention studies, and contemporary British women’s writing. She is the author of Contemporary Fictions of Attention (2018) and Alarm (2023), exploring cultural histories of attention and digital media impacts.

Her work intersects critical theory, digital culture, and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding attention’s role in society. She critiques narratives of attention ‘crises,’ advocating for attention’s ecological and interpersonal dimensions. Bennett’s analysis of texts like Ali Smith’s How to be Both highlights literature’s capacity to reframe attention as a multiplicative, non-linear experience.

Key themes include surveillance, cognitive load, and the ethics of distraction. She challenges technocentric anxieties, advocating for nuanced, historically grounded perspectives on attention’s evolution. Bennett’s scholarship bridges literary analysis with broader cultural and technological discourses.