Professor Alice Bell is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Sheffield Hallam University, affiliated with the Sheffield Creative Industries Institute, Humanities Research Centre, and Culture and Creativity Research Institute. She holds a BA, MSc, PGcertHE, and PhD. Her work focuses on digital fiction, narratology, and stylistics, with a particular emphasis on how digital technologies shape narrative forms and reader engagement. Her research explores stylistics, literary-linguistics, and narratology, with a focus on born-digital fiction such as hypertext, app-based stories, and VR narratives. Key areas include interactivity in digital environments, cognitive processing of digital texts, and ontological boundaries between fiction and reality. She has led major projects like the AHRC-funded Reading Digital Fiction (2014-2017) and collaborates on preservation initiatives like the Digital Fiction Curios project. Recent work examines postdigital themes, empirical reader responses in VR fiction, and the interplay between fact and fiction in contemporary narratives. These studies often bridge narrative theory, cognitive poetics, and digital media analysis. Professor Bell has secured significant funding, including a £349,957 AHRC/DFG grant (2023) as PI for Reading Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital . She supervises postgraduate students in areas like cognitive poetics, digital fiction, and experimental writing, including projects such as Alternate Realities: Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical Fiction and ‘Digesting Creepypasta’: A Genre Analysis of Social Media Horror Fiction . Her collaborations include work with the One-to-One Development Trust on digital preservation and co-editing projects like Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology (2019) and a special issue on fact-fiction dynamics in the European Journal of English Studies .











