Alfred Bendixen

Alfred Bendixen is a Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2014 after previous academic appointments at Barnard College, California State University Los Angeles, and Texas A&M University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina (1979). His research specializes in recovering 19th-century texts, particularly by women writers, and examining understudied genres including ghost stories, detective fiction, science fiction, and travel writing.

His scholarly contributions include editing foundational collections such as Haunted Women (1985), The Whole Family (1986/2001), and Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (1992/2016). Recent editorial works include The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015), and The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture (2017). Current projects include a volume on American literary realism for the Blackwell Literary History of the United States and studies on terror in American culture.

As founder and Executive Director of the American Literature Association, Bendixen has significantly shaped scholarly discourse in his field through national conferences and organizational leadership.