Alex Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College, 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