Education
- Ph.D. in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2023
- M.A. in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2019
- M.M. in Ethnomusicology, University of Texas at Austin, 2016
- B.M. in Piano Performance and Composition (double degree), Michigan State University, 2012
Courses at Habib
- Rhetoric and Communication
- Sound and Subjectivity
Biography
Alex Kreger is an anthropologist and musician. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and an M.M. in Ethnomusicology, both from the University of Texas at Austin. For the past decade, he has conducted ethnographic research in Turkey and its diaspora with Alevi (messianic Sufi) communities, for which he received funding from the Social Sciences Research Council and Fulbright Foundation. His work has appeared in Modern Asian Studies and the Routledge Handbook of Turkey’s Diasporas. As a performer, he plays Alevi ritual music on the saz, a long-necked lute, and is also active as a composer-improviser-pianist. His latest composition project, Mana, is a musical setting of text excerpts from sociologist Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Before coming to Habib, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Publications – Papers
- 2024: “A marketplace of love: Muhabbet and the construction of European Alevi imaginaries.” In Routledge Handbook of Turkey’s Diasporas, eds. Banu Senay and Ayca Arkilic. New York: Routledge.
- 2022: “Wearing fire and chewing iron: Oaths of peace and the suspension of monotheism in contemporary Alevism.” Modern Asian Studies, 56(3), 1022-1052.
