Allison arrives at Utrecht from the University of Cambridge, where she was a (postdoctoral) Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College. In spring 2022, she was also a Wallace Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She received her PhD in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. Her work centers on twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, poetry and poetics, and the relation of literature to the other arts.

Her first book manuscript, Mass Vernacular: American Poetic Voice in the Era of Global Broadcast, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Situating the poetry of Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde in a broad institutional and technological soundscape, it reveals how poetry intersects with both specific sound technologies, like the phonograph, the radio, the telephone, and the tape recorder, and a variety of vocal practices and institutions, including elocution instruction, live poetry readings, and radio-based forms of cultural diplomacy. Routing their poetry through modern circuits of communication, it argues that twentieth-century poets created a paradoxically intimate and global “mass vernacular,” as they envisioned lyric voices circulating in ways similar to other official and mass voices.
 
She is currently at work on a new book project entitled Florentine Modernism: The American Avant-Garde, Renaissance Art, and the History of the Aesthetic. Focusing on the work of Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Mabel Dodge Luhan, the project recovers the importance of Florence, as both a twentieth-century metropole and an emblem of the Renaissance past, to American literary modernism.