Alex Creighton

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Alex Creighton (he/they) writes about and teaches literature and culture in diverse fields, including the long eighteenth century, gender and sexuality studies, music and narrative, animal studies, and studies of time and temporality.

Biography

As a scholar of literature and culture, Creighton's research and teaching are driven by three core beliefs: 1) writing is an act of critical and creative self-awareness; 2) thinking across disciplines and methods opens up powerful new ways of understanding ourselves and our world; 3) as personal as it is, writing is also about community: we all have something to teach each other. 

Creighton's current research interests include eighteenth-century literature and culture, studies of gender and sexuality, music and literature, and animal studies. The Habits of Novels, his first academic monograph (currently under review at Oxford University Press), explores the ways in which novels and music framed and responded to class- and gender-based norms around habit and time-keeping in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Published and forthcoming articles appear in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, The Rambling, Venti, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 (forthcoming). He earned his Ph.D. in English and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, at Harvard University in 2021; and in 2013, he earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Most recently, as a 2022 ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow, he worked with U.C. Berkeley's Art of Writing Program to make writing classes and workshops available to students across the disciplines. He has been a recipient of generous fellowships and grants from the ACLS, Chawton House Library, the Berkeley Postdoctoral Association, and Harvard University. 

Creighton joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2024.