Marc Blanc

Marc Blanc’s research and teaching interests consider the intersection of race, print culture, and political economy in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature. His dissertation, Bleeding Heartland: Black Literature and Radical Publishing in the Midwest, 1877–1945, argues that networks of small, radical publishers arose throughout the Midwestern U.S. in response to the consolidation of literary capital in the urban northeast. Combining literary analysis with archival research, the project shows that independent publishing provided the means for Black and white literary dissidents to develop a racially integrated print culture in the heartland. While far from a straightforward narrative of progress, the project recovers a radical literary history that extends farther back, and farther west, than scholars have assumed.

Marc’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature and the edited pedagogical volume Teaching the Rust Belt. Public-facing articles based on his research have appeared or are forthcoming in Belt and the New Territory. He teaches a first-year seminar on utopianism in American literature, and College Writing: Power and Commodity Culture.