I am emeritus professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee, and was formerly a research associate at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurosciences Cognitives of Paris Descartes University, Boulogne-Billancourt, France. Until I retired I carried out research into eye movement control in reading and the viewing of static and moving images. I have written or edited several books on eye movement control and am the author of of over 100 journal articles and book chapters. Further details on my academic work in psychology can be found in my Wikipedia entry {Alan Kennedy (Psychologist)}.

In 2009 my wife and I left the UK, purchasing the house of the Danish sculptor René Laraignou (together with many monumental sculptures) near Marciac in the South-West of France. I established Lasserrade Press in 2009 as a vehicle for publishing my fiction and have published seven novels, including a World War Two trilogy, completed in 2018 and described by one critic as “a kind of literary fugue.” Much of my fiction is set in France. In 2015 I published Oscar & Lucy, an autobiographical biography of my predecessor in St Andrews, the South African psychologist Oscar Oeser who headed Hut 6 at Bletchley Park. I also write and lecture on the work of the children’s author Arthur Ransome and my biography A Thoroughly Mischievous Person: The Other Arthur Ransome was published by The Lutterworth press in 2021. I am the author of several essays exploring the use of myth and associative symbolism in Ransome’s fiction.

I am a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, an elected member of CLINTEL and an Honorary Member of The Experimental Psychology Society.

My most recent work (2025) is the first volume of Memoir dealing in part with psychosurgery and entitled Why my Mother Went Away. It is currently under review. The sequel, The Cardboard Crocodile, is a work in progress.