Alec Charles

Head of the School of Arts, University of Hull

Professor Alec Charles is Head of the School of the Arts at the University of Hull.

He has previously served as Head of Media at the University of Chester, and Sub-Dean of the Faculty of Creative Arts, Technologies & Science at the University of Bedfordshire. He has taught at universities in Cornwall, Japan and Eastern Europe (where he also worked as a newspaper journalist), has written and produced cultural documentaries for BBC Radio 3, and continues to act as a media commentator on BBC Radio.

He completed his doctorate in the relationship between Modernism and Postmodernism at Oxford University in 1995, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the Royal Society of Arts.

Alec has worked as a volunteer schoolteacher in southern Africa and a volunteer librarian at London Zoo, has sung in a rock band in Japan, has directed Twelfth Night in Estonia, has run a journalism training programme in Latvia, has appeared at events supported by the Aesthetica Art Prize, the Cambridge Science Festival, the British Council, the U.S. State Department, the Goethe Institute and the International Taskforce on Holocaust Education and Research, has organized conferences in Tallinn, Chester and Luton, has presented papers at conferences in Sheffield, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Loughborough, Leicester, Birmingham, London, Bournemouth, Swansea, Bangor, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Limerick, Linkoping, Kaunas, Klaipeda, Tokyo, Melbourne and Los Angeles, and is co-convenor of the Political Studies Association’s Media & Politics Group.

He is the author of Interactivity: New Media, Politics & Society (2012), Interactivity 2 (2014), Out of Time: The Deaths and Resurrections of Doctor Who (2015) and Political Animals: News of the Natural World (2016). He is co-editor of The End of Journalism (2011) and editor of Media in the Enlarged Europe (2009), Media/Democracy: A Comparative Study (2013) and The End of Journalism Version 2.0 (2014). He has contributed articles on politics, journalism, literature and screen studies to such journals as British Politics, Journalism Education, British Journalism Review, Utopian Studies, Journal of Popular Television, Science Fiction Studies and Science Fiction Film & Television, and has contributed to such collections as The Happiness Illusion, Directory of World Cinema: Britain, Doctor Who & Race, UK Election Analysis 2015, UK Referendum Analysis 2016, Reinventing Ourselves, Analysing David Peace, The Films of Tod Browning, The Films of Edgar G Ulmer, Children's Literature Review, Time & Relative Dissertations in Space, and Sport, Media & Regional Identity.