Campus Directory

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Biography

Marc Blanc, Ph.D., teaches and researches working-class writing in the American Midwest. He is particularly interested in how literary radicals used regionalist style as a method of racial integration in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His book project, "Bleeding Heartland: Race, Region, and Radicalism in Midwestern Writing," argues that regionalist literary style in the Midwest developed in correspondence with post-Civil War leftist politics and helped to integrate anticapitalist movements across race and nationality. Fellowships from the Newberry Library, the Midwest Modern Language Association, and the Rust Belt Humanities Lab have supported his research. His work has appeared in both peer-reviewed and journalistic publications such as College Literature, The Cambridge Companion to the Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, Jacobin, and Chicago Review. In the classroom, Blanc helps students examine their cultural and geographic environments through the rich lenses of literary history while developing the close reading and writing skills necessary for rigorous thinking, impactful communication, and fully engaged citizenship. He is passionate not only about preparing students for fulfilling careers but also about helping them live intellectually engaged and reflective lives. 

You can learn more about Blanc at marcblanc.com. 

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Presentations/Publications/Productions

Peer-Reviewed 

• “Pioneers and Populists: Sutton E. Griggs, Oscar Micheaux, and Independent Black Publishing at the Turn of the Century.” College Literature, vol. 51, no. 4, special issue  
• “American Literary Institutions around 1900,” edited by Sheila Liming, Alexander Starre, and Florian Sedlmeier, fall 2024, pp. 587-615. Doi: 10.1353/lit.2024.a939756 
• “Jungles on the Prairie: James Eads How, the Hobo News, and Midwestern Migrant Workers’ Writing in the 1910s.” Midwestern Miscellany, special issue on Working-Class Writing, forthcoming 2027. 
• “Revolt in the Village: Proletarian Regionalism in St. Louis’ Anvil Magazine.” Rising in River City: Grassroots Movements in St. Louis amid Depression and War, edited by Amanda L. Izzo and Benjamin Looker, University of Missouri Press, forthcoming. 
• “McKay’s ‘Angry Sonnets.’” Claude McKay in Context, edited by Gary Edward Holcomb, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. 
• “The Transatlantic Radicalism of Eric Walrond, Claude McKay, Dorothy West, and W.E.B. Du Bois.” 
• The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance., edited by Martha Patterson, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. 
• “Gateways and Borderlands: Teaching Writing in a Divided St. Louis,” with Ryan Prewitt. 
• Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Rust Belt, edited by Katharine G. Trostel and Valentino Zullo, Rutgers University Press, forthcoming.

Public Scholarship 

• “Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism.” Jacobin, February, 23 2025. 
• “Profit Margins: Oscar Micheaux’s Amazon Editions and the Digital Erasure of Black Publishing History.” Chicago Review, February 5, 2025. 
• “Peter H. Clark: St. Louis, MO.” Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest, edited by Andy Oler, University of Illinois Press, 2025, pp. 54-57.

Media Appearances 

• “Postdoctoral research fellows discuss funding cuts to the humanities,” Astrid Burns, Student Life, 24 April 2025. 
• Article profile: “ICYMI: New and Notable Articles 11.11.2024.” Rahne Alexander, Johns Hopkins University Press, November 11, 2024 (for “Pioneers and Populists”). 
• Podcast appearance: Unseen STL History Talks - “Hoboes and Architectural History,” November 22, 2023.