Profile
Lily Alexander has taught in New York since 2003, including at NYU and CUNY, and lectured at premier film schools of California, NY State and Canada. At the Dept. of Classical and Oriental Studies, she teaches a series of courses on comparative mythology. Her interests encompass world myths, folklore, theories of fiction, global narrative media, and interactive storytelling.
She has a Master’s degree in Drama and Film, and a dual doctorate in Anthropology and Comparative Cultural Studies. (Education: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Alberta, University of Toronto). Dr. Alexander’s research foci include symbolic anthropology, theories of culture, creative algorithms, and evolution of (creative) consciousness.
In addition to world mythology, she has taught global cinemas, history of narrative, screenwriting, comparative literature, genre studies, adaptation, science fiction, comedy, story structure and worldbuilding. Lily Alexander has presented at 40+ conferences (twice as a keynote speaker), including the MIT Media in Transitionseries and the forum Cognitive Futures. Her public talks include “The Author Inside, Outside and Inside Out” and “Beyond the Human Perspective – the POV of the Gods, Heroes, Aliens, and Fantastic Beings.”
As a visiting scholar at Columbia University (2004) and invited speaker at Harvard (2006), she gave a series of lectures including: “Confessions of the Sinner: Admission of Guilt in Russian and American Literature and Film” and “The Antihero in the History of Narrative Culture.” She wrote for the History Channel, the forum on emerging media at the University of Southern California, The Journal of Narrative Theory, The Russian Review, Cinema Journal and Cinema Art.
Her scholarly publications appeared in the USA, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Russia, and Israel. A member of the international Working Group on interactive storytelling and worldbuilding, she published five studies on emerging media theory. Prof. Alexander contributed articles to book collections Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice(1999), Filmbuilding(2002), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds(2017), the award-winning The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds(2018) and Exploring Imaginary Worlds(2020).
Her recently published study on theory of mythopoesis, “Mythopoetic Suspense, Eschatology and Misterium: World-Building Lessons from Dostoevsky” was delivered as an invited lecture at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris (2020). Lily Alexander authored a four-part bookset Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative & The Age of Visual Culture(2013), followed by the interactive version on Kindle, and the expanded/illustrated edition on iBookstore (2014).