ALEX MOSKOWITZ
curriculum vitae
amoskowitz@mtholyoke.edu
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mount Holyoke College. 2024-Present
Affiliated Faculty, Department of Critical Race and Political Economy, Mount Holyoke College. 2024-Present
Visiting Lecturer, Department of English, Mount Holyoke College. 2022-2024.
Affiliated Faculty, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, with a joint appointment in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College. 2021-2022.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in English, Boston College. 2021.
Dissertation: “American Imperception: Literary Form, Sensory Perception, and Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”
M.A. in English, Boston College. 2014.
B.A. in Literature, State University of New York, Purchase College. 2011.
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
Early and Nineteenth-Century American and African American Literature; Political Economy; Racial Capitalism; Marxism; The Novel; Aesthetics; Critical Theory and Philosophy
PUBLICATIONS
Book
Radical Transcendentalisms, co-editor with Ted Stolze. Brill, Historical Materialism Book Series (under contract).
Journal Articles
“Imperception.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, vol. 7, 2024.
“The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 56, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-20. Winner of the 1921 Prize in American Literature for 2023.
“Apathy, Political Emotion, and the Politics of Space in Thoreau’s Antislavery Writing.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 64, no. 2, 2022, pp. 139-160.
“Martin Delany: Labor, Ecology, and Black Freedom.” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, special issue on “African American Nature Writing,” vol. 30, 2022, pp. 59-75.
“Economic Imperception; or, Reading Capital on the Beach with Thoreau.” American Literary History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2020, pp. 221-242.
“The Production of the Subject: Foucault, Marx, and the Ontology of the Market.” Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture & Politics, vol. 27, Feb. 2019, pp. 85-110.
Book Chapters
“The Violence of Extractive Capital: Henry David Thoreau and David Walker on Abolition and Climate Change.” The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
“Disarticulating History: Teaching Politics and Affect in Thoreau’s Antislavery Essays.” Teaching the American Essay, Modern Language Association (forthcoming).
“Radical Transcendentalisms.” Radical Transcendentalisms, Brill: Historical Materialism Book Series (forthcoming).
Public Writing
“Black Political Organizing and Radical Transcendentalism: David Walker and Margaret Fuller.” Conversations, vol. 4, iss. 2, 2022, pp. 5-8.
Book Reviews
Kevin Dann, The Road to Walden: 12 Life Lessons from a Sojourn to Thoreau’s Cabin. TarcherPerigee, 2018. Reviewed in Religion and the Arts, vol. 24, no.1-2, 2020, pp. 199-201.
K.L. Evans, One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed. Northwestern UP, 2018. Reviewed in Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 56, no. 3, 2019, pp. 644-648.
Jacques Bidet, Foucault with Marx. Zed Books, 2016. Reviewed in SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, vol. 48, no. 2, 2019, pp. 119-122.
Theo Davis, Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson and Whitman. Oxford UP, 2016. Reviewed in Studies in Romanticism, vol. 56, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 297-300.
Gerhard Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Reviewed in Modern Language Studies, vol. 46 no. 1, Summer 2016, pp. 80-82.
HONORS
Fellowships
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship, “Transcendentalism and Social Reform,” 2022.
Clough Graduate Fellow, Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, Boston College. 2018-2021 (three separate year-long fellowships).
Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Boston College. 2020-2021.
Grants and Awards
1921 Prize in American Literature for “The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 56, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1-20.
C19 Travel Grant Award Recipient. 2022.
MLA Travel Grant Award Recipient. 2020.
Von Hendy Award for Graduate Student Writing, for “Economic Imperception; or, Reading Capital on the Beach with Thoreau,” Boston College. 2019.
Melville Society Travel Grant Award Recipient. 2019.
ACLA Travel Grant Award Recipient. 2019.
Mark of Distinction, Doctoral Qualifying Examinations, Boston College. 2018, 2017.
Graduate Student Association Research Grant Recipient, Boston College. 2018.
O’Laughlin Award for Exemplary Literary Studies, SUNY Purchase. 2011.
INVITED LECTURES
“Literature and the Senses,” Amherst College. October 2024.
“Imperception,” Political Concepts: The Literature Edition, The Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University. March 2023.
“Black Boston: Slavery, Abolition, and Black Radicalism,” Boston University. April 2022.
“The Politics of Environmentalism in Thoreau’s Walden and the Journal,” Emerson College. September 2021.
“Thoreau, Cape Cod, and the Senses,” Bridgewater State University. December 2018.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
“William Wells Brown and the Endless Practice of Citation,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference, Pasadena, CA. March 2024.
“The Ecology of Extractive Capital in David Walker and Henry David Thoreau,” Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, Concord, MA. July 2023.
“Charles Chesnutt and the Economic Fiction of Transformation,” American Literature Association Annual Conference, Boston, MA. May 2023.
“Black Social Life and the African American Novel; or, Clotel and the Sketch,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL. March 2023.
“The Racial Economy of Perception: Black Aesthetics and the Form of the Novel in Martin Delany’s Blake,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference, Coral Gables, FL. March 2022.
“Exceptional Incarceration: Thoreau’s Antislavery Writing and the Political Economy of the Senses,” Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, Concord, MA. July 2021.
“Thoreau’s Imperceptible Economic Beyond,” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Seattle, WA. January 2020.
“The Engineering of the Senses: Thoreau, Politics, and Literary Form,” Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, Concord, MA. July 2019.
“Confidence, Capital, and the Perception of a New Humanity,” Melville Society Conference, New York University. June 2019.
“Radical Emersonianism and the Politics of Literary Form,” American Literature Association Annual Conference, Boston, MA. May 2019.
“The Historical Spiral: The Form of History in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Georgetown University. March 2019.
“The Law of Economic Equivalence in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers,” American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA. November 2018.
“Economic Imperception in Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod,” American Literature Association Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA. May 2018.
“The Haunting Illogic of Ratiocination: The Invisibility of the Black Body in Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Pittsburgh, PA. April 2018.
“The Need for Politics in the Classroom: American Literature and the Potential for Radical Thought,” roundtable paper, Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Pittsburgh, PA. April 2018.
“Is Bartleby Nude?” Response to Frances Restuccia’s “Agamben’s Ontology of Nudity,” “Theory/After Theory,” Boston College. December 2017.
“‘Is it Alive?’: The Messianic Rejection of Labor in Hawthorne’s ‘The Artist of the Beautiful,’” Tufts University. October 2017.
“‘The Armed Man With Whom They Must Buckle’: Teleology, Contradiction, and Capitalism in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation,” Harvard University. May 2017.
“Truth, Subjectivity, and the Market: Determining the Site of Veridiction in Foucault and Marx,” Boston College. March 2017.
“Techniques of Revolution and the Aesthetics of Alienation: Marx and Benjamin,” Boston College. November 2016.
“Fractured Identity and the Limits of Knowledge: Melville, Marx, and the Whiteness of the Whale,” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Hartford, CT. March 2016.
PANELS, SEMINARS, AND CONFERENCES ORGANIZED
Chair, “Bad Feelings, Genre Experiments: Democracy, Negative Affects, and 19th-Century American Literariness,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference, Pasadena, CA. March 2024.
Seminar Organizer, “Theories of the American Novel,” at American Comparative Literature Association, Chicago, IL. March 2023.
Event Organizer, Invited Lecture with Britt Rusert, Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. Mount Holyoke College. November 2022.
Session Organizer, “Melville, Capital, and Social Critique,” at Melville Society Conference, New York University. June 2019.
Conference Organizer, “Radical Materialisms,” Boston College. Keynote Speaker: Nathan Wolff, Associate Professor of English, Tufts University. April 2019.
Seminar Organizer, “Marxism and Form, Revisited,” at American Comparative Literature Association, Georgetown University. March 2019.
Event Organizer, “Ruthless, Militant, Round: On Melville and the Aesthetics of Radical Democracy,” with Jennifer Greiman, Associate Professor of English, Wake Forest University. Boston College. February 2019.
Session Organizer, “The Ideological Emergency of the Frontier,” at American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA. November 2018.
Session Organizer, “The Spatial Language of Literature: Sovereign Space and the Borders of Capital,” at Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Pittsburgh, PA. April 2018.
Conference Organizer, “Order and Disorder: The (De)construction of Narrative in Literature and Thought,” Boston College. Keynote Speaker: Joseph Rezek, Associate Professor of English, Boston University. April 2017.
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
“Radical Transcendentalism, Then and Now,” Co-Produced with Ted Stolze, Podcast for the National Endowment for the Humanities: “Transcendentalism and Social Reform,” May 2023.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Mount Holyoke College
ENGL-382MX: “I Would Prefer Not To: Marxism and Early American Literature,” Fall 2024.
ENGL-199: “Introduction to the Study of Literature: Literary Diagnosis,” Spring 2024.
ENGL-350AB: “Abolition and Climate Change,” Fall 2023.
ENGL-240: “Early American Narratives and Counter Narratives,” Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023.
ENGL-254EN/AFCNA-241BA: “The Early African American Novel,” Spring 2023.
ENGL-350AM: “Race and Sensory Perception in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” Fall 2022.
ENGL-240: “American Literature I,” Fall 2022.
Emerson College
“Sensing Freedom: African American Literature and Perception,” Fall 2021.
“U.S./American Literatures,” Fall 2021.
“Honors Seminar: Literature and Culture of the Americas,” Fall 2021.
Boston College
“Discontinuous Histories in American Literature,” Spring 2019.
“Literature Core: The Political Labor of Literature,” Fall 2018.
“Literature Core: Capitalism and Resistance,” Fall 2017, Spring 2018.
“First-Year Writing Seminar: Culture and the Self,” Fall 2013, Spring 2014.
TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language)
English Language Teacher, Jazyková Škola Glossa. Prague, Czech Republic. 2014-2015.
English Language Teacher, Jazyková Škola Jipka. Prague, Czech Republic. 2011-2012.
SERVICE
To the Profession
Manuscript Reviewer: ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; SAF: Studies in American Fiction; The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies; Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal; Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review; Polity
Editorial Board Member, The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies. 2024-Present.
Conference Organizer for the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association, The Thoreau Society. 2024-Present.
Associate Editor, The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies. 2019-2024.
Editorial Assistant, The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies. 2018-2019.
Mount Holyoke College
Organizer, “Economies of Enslavement in the Atlantic World,” Invited Speaker Series. 2022-2023.
Boston College
Founder and Coordinator, Race and Democracy Working Group, Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. 2020-2021.
Graduate Fellow Coordinator, Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. 2020-2021.
President, Boston College English Department Graduate Student Association. 2018-2019.
Co-Director, Boston College English Graduate Conference. 2017-2019.
Assistant Co-Director, Boston College English Graduate Conference. 2016-2017.
Search Committee Member, Graduate Student Panel for African American Literature and Culture Tenure-Track Candidate. 2017.
Submissions Committee Director, Boston College English Department Graduate Student Colloquium. 2015.
M.A. Student Representative, Department of English, Boston College. 2013-2014.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) Certification. The Language House: Prague. Prague, Czech Republic. 2011.
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
African American Literature and Culture Society
American Studies Association
The Melville Society
Modern Language Association
The Thoreau Society
LANGUAGES
German
Slovak
Czech
REFERENCES
Upon request