Marc Blanc

Marc Blanc’s research and teaching are focused on the literary and print cultures of radical social movements. His dissertation, Bleeding Heartland: Race, Region, and Radicalism in Midwest Print Culture, 1877–1945, argues that socialist, anarchist, and populist publications offered opportunities for Black and white radicals to exchange writing across the color line during a period marked by segregation and racial nationalism. Combining literary analysis with archival research, the project highlights the texts and paratexts of works by Peter H. Clark, Lucy Parsons, Sutton E. Griggs, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Jack Conroy. While far from a straightforward narrative of progress, the dissertation uncovers an insurgent 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 in Belt and New Territory. He teaches a first-year seminar on utopianism in American literature, and College Writing: Power and Commodity Culture.

"Democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every 'citizen' can 'govern' and that society places him ... in a general condition to achieve this." —Antonio Gramsci, "On Education"