For this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk to award-winning author, cultural historian and literary critic Alexandra Harris about the research and writing practices behind her new book, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape (Faber, 2024). Alexandra is a professorial fellow in English at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Her books include Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists & the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, which won The Guardian First Book award and a Somerset Maugham award, and Weatherland, which was adapted into a 10-part radio series for the BBC. This conversation explores what a literary scholar can bring to the study of local history, the power of place, and how “trespassing” researchers can find new insights in familiar records of everyday and celebrated lives.