Alexander Hartley

I am a researcher and critic. 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; modern and contemporary poetry; and theories of aesthetic emancipation.In spring 2026 I got my Ph.D. at the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard. I am currently a Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.

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 series of essays that address 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 AI-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:Review of Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat by Hito Steyerl (Verso, 2025)
(Critical AI 4.1, 2026)
I consider Hito Steyerl’s view of the artscape in the age of AI.‘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’.

Edited book

Together with the wonderful Klaus Benesch, I’m working on an edited book:A Humanities Handbook
(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 Wutz

Contact

You can write to me at ah2064 (at) cam (dot) ac (dot) uk.