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Alexander William McHoul (born 14 June 1952^{[citation needed]}) is a British–Australian sociologist. He is an emeritus professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.

McHoul was born in Wallasey, a town on the Wirral Peninsula, England.^{[citation needed]} In 1973, he graduated from the University of Lancaster, with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Literature and Linguistics and, in 1974, a Master of Arts.^{[citation needed]} In 1975, he moved to Australia.^{[citation needed]} In 1978, he received a PhD from Australian National University, with a thesis titled Telling how texts talk: from readings of Wittgenstein, Schutz, ethnomethodology and the sociology of literature to the analysis of readings.^[1]

McHoul’s work spans a range of academic fields such as linguistics, cultural theory, continental philosophy and literary theory. Robert Eaglestone, for example, says of McHoul’s’ Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics: ‘The book is no less … an attempt to work in at least three fields at once, and McHoul seems at home dealing with analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, semiotics, and linguistics‘.^[2] Douglas Ezzy says, ‘His [McHoul’s] theoretical range is wide, drawing on Wittgenstein, Saussure, ethnomethodology [and] phenomenology‘..^[3]

• Telling How Texts Talk: Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982
• Wittgenstein on Certainty and the Problem of Rule in Social Science. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle, 1986
• (with David Wills) Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. London: Macmillan, 1990; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990
• (with Wendy Grace) A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject. Melbourne University Press, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998; University College London Press, 1995; New York University Press, 1997, 1998; University of Otago Press, 1998
• Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics. University of Nebraska Press, 1996
• (with Toby Miller) Popular Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage, 1998, 1996
• (with Susan Hansen and Mark Rapley; contributions from Hayley Miller and Toby Miller) Beyond Help: A Consumer’s Guide to Psychology. Ross–on–Wye: PCCS Books, 2003

• (edited with Mark Rapley) How to Analyse Talk in Institutional Settings: A Casebook of Methods. London and New York: Continuum, 2001

• (with Pierre Van Osselaer) Jean–Marie Floch, Visual Identities. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Translation of Identités visuelles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.

• “Research publications of Alec McHoul”. Murdoch University.