Alison studied English Literature at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, before moving on to an MLitt in American Studies at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oklahoma. The MLitt dissertation, on Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America, led to a PhD at King’s College, London, focusing on the role of language in the construction and portrayal of identity in the literature of seventeenth-century Puritan New England. Alison completed her PhD in August 2012 and is currently employed as a Teaching Fellow in American Literature at King’s College, London.