Alex Wermer-Colan is a CLIR postdoctoral fellow at Temple University’s Digital Scholarship Center. He received his Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center in the Spring of 2017. His essay, “Implicating the Confessor: The Autobiographical Ploy in William S. Burroughs’ Early Works,” was published in the Winter, 2010 issue of Twentieth Century Literature.
He edited a collection of unpublished archival materials involving Burroughs experimenting by cutting up texts by other writers, from Arthur Rimbaud to Anthony Burgess. The collection, entitled The Travel Agency is on Fire, was published by Lost & Found in the Spring, 2015, and is available here: http://www.centerforthehumanities.org/lost-and-found/publications/william-s-burroughs-the-travel-agency-is-on-fire. These text were later set to music and performed by a group of musicians and artists in NYC at The Stone. Video is available here: http://experimentsinopera.com/portfolio-item/the-travel-agency-is-on-fire/.
Alex also organized the William S. Burroughs Centennial Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center on April 25th, 2014. He is currently co-editing and contributing to a new anthology of criticism and archival materials on Burroughs and the cut-up entitled Cutting Up the Century, slated to be published by Indiana University Press, 2017.
European Beat Studies Network 