Marc Blanc

Marc Blanc’s research and teaching focus on the writing and publishing practices of 19th and early 20th-century social movements. His dissertation and first book project, Bleeding Heartland: Race, Region, and Radicalism in Midwestern Writing, argues that a racially integrated public sphere emerged through partisan print cultures earlier and in more peripheral locations than scholars have previously assumed. With materialist readings of texts by socialists, anarchists, and Populists who wrote in marginal locations from Cincinnati to Kansas, the book unearths a period when the meaning of the “heartland” and the viability of mass, interracial protest were in contest. The writers and editors at the center of this research include Lucy E. Parsons, Sutton E. Griggs, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, JMMLA, and the pedagogy volume Teaching the Rust Belt, alongside several public-facing venues.

As a teacher, Marc has worked in formal and informal classroom settings ranging from private and public universities and writing centers to local bookshops and outdoor teach-ins. At Washington University, he teaches the first-year seminar “What We Might Have Been: Utopianism in American Literature,” the upper-division “Black Riders: 19th-Century African American Print Culture,” and the College Writing Program’s “College Writing: Power and Commodity Culture.” Beyond campus, he has created and facilitated programs for equitable educational exchange and participatory research for academics and St. Louis community members, most recently co-organizing the St. Louis Symposium for Radicalism in US Arts.

"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"