Alec enjoyed teaching many German and Comparative Literature courses during his time at USC, including CPLT 270, CPLT 150, GERM 122, and GERM 280. His PhD dissertation is titled, “The Mountains Call: Escaping to ‘Zones of Seclusion’” and examines the use of rural, Alpine locations to comment on permeating silence in Austria and Switzerland in the literature of Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, and Fleur Jaeggy. His MA thesis is titled “A New South Tyrol: A Multilingual, Multicultural Society”, and compares German and Italian language literature from South Tyrol out of the postwar era.