Dr Allayne Horton
Research Fellow
Office of the Executive Dean, Faculty of Education and Arts
Areas of expertise: literary education; affect studies; socially just pedagogies; difficult knowledge; english teaching; text selection
Email: [email protected]
Location: ACU Melbourne Campus
HDR Supervisor accreditation status: HDR Supervisor (Provisional)
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7304-7593
ORCID link: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7304-7593
Allayne Horton is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education and Arts. Her research explores the ethical potential of literary education, with a close attention to difficult knowledge texts and high-stakes classroom contexts. She is interested in creative, relational, affective and embodied approaches to research and pedagogy.
Allayne is a member of the Literary Education Lab and the Worldviews Literacy Lab. Before joining ACU, she was a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, and prior to entering academia, she spent nearly a decade as a secondary English and humanities teacher in schools across the ACT and Victoria.
Allayne holds a PhD in Education and a Master of Teaching from the University of Melbourne, and first-class honours in English literature from the Australian National University.
She welcomes research conversations and enquiries from prospective HDR students in literary education, English curriculum, affect, difficult knowledge, ethically and emotionally challenging literature, and socially just teaching approaches.
Select publications
- Bacalja, A., McKnight, L., Shafer, D., Frawley, E., Horton, A., Ashraf, T., & Loh, J. (2026). English in a neoliberal age:(re) shaping subjectivities. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 1-16.
- Horton, A. & Nah, D. (2025). What of the scribbles & murmurs? A dialogic approach to troublesome data on the student experience of ethically challenging literature. Australian Journal of English Education, 60(2), 73-82.
- Horton, A. (2024). 'Empathy is a better emotion': the trouble with empathy in high stakes English classrooms. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 31(3), 291-306. https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2024.2372859
- Horton, A., & McLean Davies, L. (2022). Where are the students? A close reading of priorities and silences in scholarly and public debates on VCE English (1990-2021). The Australian Educational Researcher, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00543-2
Awards
- ACU Historical Children's Book Collections fellow (2026)
- Nominated by the University of Melbourne for the AARE Ray Debus Award for Best Doctoral Thesis (2026)
- Research Training Program Scholarship (2020-2025) (Stipend and Fee Offset), University of Melbourne
- Inaugural Argyle Scholarship prize in Education (2016), University of Melbourne
- Chancellor's Letter of Commendation (2014), the Australian National University
Appointments and Affiliations
- Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
- Gender and Education Association
- International Association for Research in L1 Education (ARLE)
- Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE)
Editorial roles
- Associate Editor, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
- Reviewer for the Australian Educational Researcher and New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies
Public engagement
- 2024 Literary Education and the role of reading for social change. Talking Teaching Podcast
- https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mgse-talking-teaching/episodes/Literary-Education-and-the-role-of-reading-for-social-change-e2fmtml/a-aav5ia
- Horton, A. (2021). Feeling like an English teacher: Embracing an emergent identity. Idiom, 57(3), 8-11.
