Alex Alston
Academic Departments
Education
M.A. & Ph.D., Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature
M.A., Columbia University, African & African American Studies
B.A., Duke University, African & African American Studies
Areas of Focus
19th and 20th-century Black eco-literary traditions, the afterlives of slavery, ecofeminism, political ecology, the neo-slave narrative genre
Biography
Alex’s research and teaching concern political ecology, the afterlives of slavery, and Black ecofeminist thought across 19th and 20th-century African American literature and life. His current book project, “Beyond ‘Mere Use:’ Charles Chesnutt and the Political Ecologies of African American Literature, 1890-1930” connect Chesnutt’s late 19th-century short stories in the plantation tales genre to the work of other early 20th century Black authors such as Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown, on the grounds that these authors offer distinct but related ecological critiques of Jim-Crow enclosure and other forms of primitive accumulation that structure(d) Black dispossession past and present. He has previously held the ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Cheryl A. Wall Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and Afro-Diasporic Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.