Teaching Fellows

Alex is a cultural historian who specializes in the American South after the Civil War. He is interested in how the presumed oddities of Southern life render visible currents that ran subterranean through other regions, providing a framework to realize a fuller understanding of U.S. history, its myths, and its contradictions. His first project examines how white Southerners continued to work through the death, violence, and subversions of the Civil War for more than a half-century following Confederate surrender. Far from simply regressing and clinging to old systems of meaning-making made irrelevant by wartime destruction, whites in the New South were engaged in creative experiments with culture that were sometimes odd, sometimes horrible, but seldom lifeless or automatic. He earned his MA (2015) and PhD (2021) from the University of Chicago.