Dr Alexandra du Plessis

Alexandra du Plessis (née Gushurst-Moore) is an Affiliated Lecturer of the History of Art Department and a Research Associate at the University of Exeter, where she is investigating collaborative art making and the creative process in the context of mid to late-Victorian fantasy production. Her doctoral thesis, titled "The Making of Modern Fantasy in the Visual Arts of England, c. 1850-1920", was supervised by Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn at the University of York; she holds an MA(Hons) from the University of Edinburgh and an MSt from the University of Oxford.

Her primary area of research is fantasy as a visual mode. Other research interests include modern fantasy art and literature, Pre-Raphaelite legacies, interdisciplinary literature and art studies, speculative futures, worldbuilding and worldmaking, embodied research, and art making as method. She is currently writing a monograph from research conducted towards her PhD; this will be a thematic survey of fantasy art making in the late Victorian period, which situates an exploration of the formal elements of the fantasy mode in the context of late Victorian British artists' relationships.

Beyond her research, she has professional experience of and interest in British educational policy, the strategy and operation of HEIs, and the facilitation of inclusive and supportive research cultures. She coordinated Cambridge Visual Culture between July 2022 and July 2024.