Alexis Harley is the Director of Graduate Research in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe, having recently been the Graduate Research Coordinator for the Department of Languages and Cultures.

There are two main strands to her research: the first of these, which grew from her doctoral project on the autobiographies of nineteenth-century atheists, agnostics and apostates, involves autobiography and life writing more broadly; the second considers the interplay of literary and aesthetic culture and natural history in the long nineteenth century. These strands are twined in Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self, in which Alexis makes a case for reading the history of biology alongside the history of life writing. This book unravels the interactions of evolutionary theories, nineteenth-century autobiographical practices and the human subject, and shows how the lived experience of individual theorists and their practices of self-narrativisation impacted upon their biological formulations. 

Analysing how literary and aesthetic cultures have shaped scientific research, natural history writing, and the theorisation of nature itself, Alexis' work focuses particularly on the long nineteenth century, a period of intensified literary, ecological and cultural change. This work ranges across subjects as diverse as the literary influences on colonial specimen collecting practices, the role of poetic culture in early colonial representations of so-called lyrebirds, colonial representations of rabbits and the origins of invasion ecology, how Romantic aesthetic culture manifests in Charles Darwin's early writing, and how the poetics of the sublime influenced early nineteenth-century writing about geology and climate.