Alexander Hartley

I am a researcher and critic. As of spring 2026, I’m finishing my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. In October I will begin work as a Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.In my research, I consider how the production, circulation and distribution of cultural products have been shaped by legal, aesthetic, and technological change. My work focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century to the present.I’m especially interested in intellectual-property law, a body of jurisprudence that seems to turn ‘immaterial’ ideas and forms into ‘material’ properties and factors of production. Or, in Marx’s language, to turn ‘superstructure’ into ‘base’.My other primary interests are critical theory and its history; midcentury poetry in English; and theories of aesthetic emancipation.I live in East London.

Research

Here are three research strands I’m working on at the moment:Colonial copyright
My Ph.D. dissertation, which is called ‘The Copyright World System: Modernism, Colonial Copyright, and Literary Authorship’, is rooted in English- and French-language Caribbean modernisms. It argues that Caribbean modernist poets were deeply influenced, in their reimagination of literary authorship and the persona of the author, by the comparatively recent arrival of colonial copyright law.Generative AI and cultural metabolism
The majority of text on today’s internet was produced by digital tools such as generative AI. In our culture, machine-generated texts and images are increasingly abundant. How does this affect the processes of circulation, adaptation, and reuse that characterise cultural change? How does it intersect with our laws and intuitions about intellectual property? And what is left of the cultural ‘commons’ that provides the essential background to human creativity? I am working on a short book that addresses these questions.Aesthetic progress
Can art get better? For most people today, to speak of ‘aesthetic progress’ seems like a contradiction in terms. We probably incline instead toward E. M. Forster’s view: “History develops, art stands still.” But in both copyright law and aesthetic discourse, the idea of aesthetic progress was not only thinkable but essential throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then, in the course of a couple of decades at the start of the twentieth century, aesthetic progress was totally repudiated and marginalised as an idea. My research asks: why did this happen, and what did we lose?

Publications

Here are some links to places you can read my work. (If you would like a copy of anything paywalled, just email me)Public-facing essays:‘To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT’
(Boston Review, 2024)
Translated as ‘Propriété intellectuelle et IA : Regarder vers l’aval plutôt que l’amont’, multitudes 100, 2026
The proliferation of GAI-produced content scrambles our ideas of intellectual property. Placing this development in historical context, I argue for a renovation of copyright law to prevent a concentration of IP in the hands of tech companies.Academic essays and chapters:‘Is Beckett’s Drama ‘Stopped’? Accounting for the Aesthetics of Theatrical Copyright’
(Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 37.2, 2025)
Scholars and critics often say that the Beckett estate, through strict management of the author’s theatrical rights, has ‘stopped’ or ‘frozen’ the plays. Instead, I argue, the estate is continuously producing them afresh through its various legal and contractual actions.‘Killing a Cow on Kids’ TV: The case of Die Sendung mit der Maus’
(Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Television, ed. by Lauren Stephenson, Robert Edgar, and John Marland, Bloomsbury, 2024)
This West German children’s television show emerged in the late 1960s with a radical mission to defamiliarise the adult world for its child audience. I consider the influence of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School on the programme-makers, and chart the show’s deradicalisation over the course of the 1970s.‘Beckett’s legal scuffles and the interpretation of the plays’
(Journal of Modern Literature 43.3, 2020)
I assess Samuel Beckett’s reputation as an “arch-controller of his work”. Though that reputation is not entirely accurate, it is also true that, because of copyright management, the plays as they are actually performed have differed substantially from their published forms: ‘stage Beckett’ is different from ‘page Beckett’.Forthcoming work:‘McKay’s dialect writing in Jamaican and British print cultures’
(forthcoming in the edited volume Claude McKay in Context, ed. by Gary Edward Holcomb, Cambridge UP)
Claude McKay’s 91 ‘Jamaican’ poems of 1911–12 tend to be treated as a single undifferentiated body of work. I show how McKay carefully tailored his poetic voice to his difference print audiences in Jamaica and the UK, uncovering strategic and ironic modes of address – part of an experimental construction of various authorial personae.‘What was, and is, colonial copyright?’
(forthcoming in the edited volume African Creativity and Copyright: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, ed. by Véronique Pouillard and Anna Marie Skråmestø Nesheim, Lexington Books)
The term ‘colonial copyright’ has seen increasing scholarly use in the last decade. I unpick three senses of the term: its historical use to designate a ‘problem space’ of British imperial law and policy; its conceptual characterisation of copyright itself; and its designation of an unjust contemporary global IP regime.

Books

Together with wonderful collaborators, I’m working on two edited books:A Humanities Handbook for the 21st Century
(Co-edited with Klaus Benesch; under contract with The MIT Press)
A trade book that considers the public and political roles of the humanities during a time of intense political opposition. Advocates for projects such as a renovated aesthetic education, extramural cultural interventions, and reckoning with institutional complicity.
Contributors: Anastasia Berg, Hanjo Berressem, Homi Bhabha, David Blight, Elisabeth Bronfen, D. Graham Burnett, Ashley Dawson, Priyamvada Gopal, Stephen Greenblatt, Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr., Andrew Hartman, Ursula Heise, Nathan Heller, Grace Lavery, Sophie Lewis, David Lubin, Christopher Newfield, Joseph North, David Nye, Miles Orvell, Andrew Ross, Matt Seybold, Mackenzie Wark, Deva Woodly, Michael WutzUsing Theory in Times of Crisis: The Frankfurt School in the Twenty-First Century
(Co-edited with Paulina Choh and Ben Morgan; under contract with De Gruyter)
An academic edited volume. Essays adopt and adapt Frankfurt School critical theory in relation to contemporary concerns such as free speech debates, environmental politics, trans theory, ‘the end of history’, and critical pedagogy.
Contributors: Russell Berman, Phoebe Braithwaite, Carl Cassegård, Bo-Mi Choi, Peter Conroy, Rainer Forst, Lois McNay, Alexandra Schauer, Francis Whorrall-Campbell

Contact

Write to me at ahartley (at) fas (dot) harvard (dot) edu.