A.K. (Ashley) Maher, Dr

Before joining the University of Groningen in August 2019, Ashley Maher was the Stevenson Junior Research Fellow in English at University College, Oxford, and a Lecturer at the University of Sydney. She was awarded her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, where she was an Olin Fellow. In 2024 she was awarded a Culture & Animals Foundation Grant to visit the archives of novelist Brigid Brophy, and she spent Michaelmas Term at Jesus College, Oxford, as a short-term visiting research fellow. In 2025 she was awarded €50,000 as part of the NWO Social Sciences and Humanities Open Competition.

Her research specialties include modern and contemporary British literature (particularly midcentury fiction), modernism across media, visual culture, the environment, British political history, architectural theory and history, the history of modernist criticism, and the novel.

She is the author of Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State (2020), which was published with Oxford University Press as part of the Mid-Century Studies Series. Her work has also appeared in ELH, Textual Practice, and the Journal of Modern Literature. She is currently writing a book investigating how midcentury British writers borrowed concepts such as administration, organization, populations, and welfare from zoologists and political scientists to imagine new directions for the novel after modernism.