Welcome, New Faculty!
This fall, Bennington College welcomes two new faculty members: Alex Creighton, who teaches Critical Writing, and Kaolack Ibrahima Ndiaye, who teaches Africana Dance.
Alex Creighton writes about and teaches literature and culture in diverse fields, including the long eighteenth century, gender and sexuality studies, music and narrative, animal studies, and studies of time and temporality. In Fall 2024, Creighton will be teaching two Scriptorium courses: Masks and Metamorphoses, and Multiverses, Utopias, and Dreamscapes, Oh My!
Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye (Kaolack) was born and raised in Senegal by his grandmother. As a dancer/choreographer, his work is entirely focused on pushing boundaries off space and time, liveness, and fully being in the spaces we inhabit and claim as our own, while making space for spirit to be present. In Fall 2024, Ndiaye will be teaching Ndaga: A Way of Making Dance; Sankofa: Archiving - Finding Your History in Order to Go Forward; and Movement Practice: Sénémali - Traditional West African Dance I & II.
What excites you the most about teaching at Bennington?
Creighton: I love that Bennington students form their own unique courses of study. Critical writing is similarly a matter of finding one's way into a unique interpretation or argument. This takes time, thoughtfulness, and an openness to revision, but finding the words for a complex thought or set of thoughts is rewarding.
Ndiaye: Bennington is a place where people come to do what has never been done before. I am excited about the amazing times of sharing that I will have with the Bennington College community, faculty and students included.
Can you share your current professional research/projects, and any recent publications, exhibitions, or awards you'd like to spotlight?
Creighton: I am working on a few projects right now. My first academic monograph, The Habits of Novels, explores the ways in which novels and music framed and responded to class- and gender-based norms around habit and time-keeping in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This work has been supported by generous fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Chawton House Library, the Berkeley Postdoctoral Association, and Harvard University. Right now I am working on a revision of the whole thing.
A couple of my shorter, public-facing works are "Clarissa; Or, the History of a Fact-Checker" and "Variations on Air Music." I will have a new article, "Tristram Shandy's Variations on Habit," published with a journal called Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 later this summer.
Ndiaye: Ndaga is both a genre of music and dance form created by women from the Kaolack region of Senegal. The creative practice has a rich collaboration and resistance history between Senegalese and Gambian people across colonial borders. An innovative approach grounded in feminist practices as strategies for creating safe spaces, my research is an attempt to create a dance vocabulary and unpack its potential as a technique.
An epistemological shift from non-western ideology, such a task would extend the boundaries of space and time, race, gender, and liveness, fully being in the areas we inhabit and claim as our own. At the same time, it is making space for spirit to be present. It is also about the transmission of embodied knowledge. Our bodily knowledge is the animist information rooted in indigenous cultural dance practices connected to ancestral wisdom. My research engages in decolonization by creating mesmerizing and futuristic images. Another motive for this research endeavor is to share more broadly in an academic and aesthetic context to uncover, re-position, and affirm historical legacies and traditions at risk of being lost. I have been awarded the President's Fund for Excellence 2023 at UARTS.
What is your favorite place on the Campus or your favorite local attraction?
Creighton: What a beautiful campus! I am (unsurprisingly) already in love with Crossett Library and Roz's Cafe. I am also excited to be back in the northeast, where I grew up. I did my undergraduate at Williams College, so it feels like I've come full circle back to a region I have long loved!
Ndiaye: The first time I visited the campus, I was struck by the beauty of the campus’s architectural design and how they integrated nature. I’m looking forward to exploring the local attractions.