Alec Magnet

PhD candidate in English and adjunct lecturer at CCNY

Alec Magnet is a PhD candidate in English writing a dissertation on American and British writers of the long nineteenth century who use gothic conventions to explore and enact relationships of emotional over-investment in texts, artworks, or idealized others. He is an adjunct lecturer at CCNY and an active member the English Student Association.

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Academic Interests

I’m interested in [queer] [aesthetics] and the history of the Gothic in [nineteenth century] [British] and [American] literature. My work focuses on hard-won, politically generative, and emotionally nourishing practices of [liking things], especially among people who are queer, unusually [shame]-prone, or otherwise different. Some key areas of inquiry include: [queer performativity] and [reparative reading], [gender], [affect], [relational] and [intersubjective] [psychoanalysis], [mourning and melancholia], [cannibalism], [sentimentality], [camp], [pop], and [fandom]. [Teaching] is extremely important to me. I’m particularly interested in [writing-intensive] teaching, [emotional pedagogy], and experiments with [digital] and [multi-media] [classroom techniques] and [assignments].

Positions
  • Adjunct LecturerEnglishCity College of New York
  • Doctoral CandidateEnglishCUNY Graduate Center
Publications

The Queer, Statistical Kinship of Tennyson and Melville.” Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature. Ed. Duc Dau and Shale Preston. New York: Routledge, 2015.