Alex Moskowitz

he/him

  • Assistant Professor of English
Alex Moskowitz

Alex Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at , where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American and African American literature. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled American Imperception: Literary Form, Sensory Perception, and Political Economy in Early American Literature. His book traces the way in which the modern sensorium has developed alongside the political economy of slavery. Moskowitz’s writing on racialized perception in the early African American novel, abolition’s political economic affects, and death, capital, and the senses has appeared in journals such as NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, American Literary History, and elsewhere. He is coeditor of Radical Transcendentalisms (Brill, 2025), a forthcoming collection of essays that reconsiders the political radicalism of the Transcendentalist movement. Previously, he served as Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies.

 At Mount Holyoke, Moskowitz teaches classes broadly within the early American period that emphasize the continued political, economic, and social relevance of early American and African American literature. He regularly offers classes such as “Early American Narratives and Counternarratives,” “Abolition and Climate Change,” and “I Would Prefer Not To: Marxism and Early American literature,” as well as introductory courses that consider how literature diagnoses social problems.

Areas of Expertise

Early and Nineteenth-Century American and African American Literature; Marxism, Political Economy, and Capitalism; The Novel, Aesthetics, and Literary Form; Racial Capitalism, Critical Theory, and Affect Theory; Slavery, Abolition, and The Early African American Novel

Education

  • Ph.D., Boston College
  • M.A., Boston College
  • B.A., State University of New York, Purchase College

Recent Publications

Moskowitz, A. ᳾پDz.”&Բ;Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, iss. 7, 2024.

Moskowitz, A. 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.

Moskowitz, A. “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.

Moskowitz, A. “Martin Delany: Labor, Ecology, and Black Freedom.” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, vol. 30, 2022, pp. 59-75.

Moskowitz, A. "Black Political Organizing and Radical Transcendentalism: David Walker and Margaret Fuller." Conversations, vol. 4, iss. 2, 2022, pp. 5-8.

Recent Awards

Moskowitz, A. (2023) 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.

Moskowitz, A. Clough Fellowship, The Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, 2018-2021.

Moskowitz, A. National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship, “Transcendentalism and Social Reform,” 2022.

Recent Honors

Moskowitz, A. (2024) Invited Speaker, "Literature and the Senses." Amherst College, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, October 2024.

 

Moskowitz, A. (2023) Invited Speaker, “Imperception,” Political Concepts: The Literature Edition, The Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University. March 2023. 


 

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