Kristin Bluemel, Ph.D.

Interim Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor of English
Wayne D. McMurray and Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities
Graduate Faculty

Department: School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Office: Plangere Center Lot 121

Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:00-6:00 p.m.; and by appointment.

Phone: 732-571-3622

Email: kbluemel@monmouth.edu

View Twitter @KristinBluemel

View academia.edu

Kristin Bluemel is professor of English and the Wayne D. McMurray endowed chair in the Humanities. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on British literature, the novel, children’s literature, and literary theory. Her research bridges fields of twentieth-century literary studies, children’s literature, middlebrow studies, modernist studies, book history, and print culture. Recent work on British interwar rural literature and culture brought her to Newcastle University in Spring term 2022 as Leverhulme visiting professor.

Bluemel’s first book, Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1997), was one of the earlier monographs on Richardson’s 13-volume novel. Her studies of 1930s and 1940s literature led to George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (2004), which itself led to the edited volume Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (2009; 2011). Ideas about intermodernism and middlebrow culture launched her studies of British children’s literature, book illustration, and especially wood engraved illustrations of the interwar and war years. Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (2018), an interdisciplinary project co-edited with Michael McCluskey, was her first major contribution to the rural humanities. She is currently at work on a monograph titled “Enchanted Wood: Women Artists, Rural Britain, and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival,” to be published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Personal Statement

My interests in rural studies stem from my childhood in the small town of Holden, Massachusetts, quietly proximate to rural lands, economies, and leisure. Holden had a handsome, turreted public library where I spent more hours reading in happy isolation than I ever spent walking, skiing, or climbing the New England fields and woods. My heroines were Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Abby Kelley Foster. In some ways, they still are.

Education

Ph.D., Rutgers University

B.A., Wesleyan University

Research Interests

Twentieth-century British and Irish literature, modernism and intermodernism, rural modernity, the novel, literary criticism and theory, children’s literature, visual culture and illustration studies, and book history.

Books

Editor of Blitz Writing: Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time. Inez Holden. Handheld Press, 2019.

Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention. Edited by Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey. Edinburgh University Press/Oxford University Press, 2018.

Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Editor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Paperback issued 2011. US Distribution Columbia University Press.

George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Experimenting on the Borders of Modernism: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Scholarly Articles

Recent Articles and Book Chapters

Review of” Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II” by Claire Seiler. Modernism/modernity. 29.4 (2023): 893-95.

“Thomas Bewick and the Women Who Loved Him.” Cherryburn Times. 8.1 (2022): 2-4.

Review of ‘Women, Literature, and the Arts of the Countryside in Early Twentieth-Century England, by Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith. Journal of British Studies 62.1 (2023): 296-97.

“Orwell and Feminism.” The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. Ed. Nathan Waddell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022. Forthcoming.

“The Regional and the Rural.” Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s. Ed. James B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 160-174..

“Beyond Englishness: Regionalism and Ruralism in the 1930s.” A History of 1930s British Literature. Ed. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 16-30.

“Introduction: Rural Modernity in Britain.” Co-authored with Michael McCluskey. Rural Modernity: A Critical Intervention. Ed. Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018, pp. 1-16.

“Windmills and Woodblocks: Agnes Miller Parker, Wood Engraving, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain.” Rural Modernity: A Critical Intervention. Ed. Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018, pp. 84-102.

“Ordinary Places, Intermodern Genres: Documentary and Literature.” Futility and Anarchy? British Literature in Transition, Volume 2: 1920-1940. Ed. Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 182-98.

“Regions, Maps, Readers: Theorizing Middlebrow Geography.” Belphegor, Littératures populaires et culture médiatique. Special topics issue on “European Middlebrow.” Ed. Diana Holmes and Matthieu Letourneux. 15.2. 12 Dec. 2017. http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/948.

“Feminist inter/Modernist Studies.” Co-authored with Phyllis Lassner. Feminist Modernist Studies. Inaugural special double issue: “Towards Feminist Modernisms.” Ed. Cassandra Laity. 1.1-2 (2018): 22-35. Taylor and Francis Online. 14 Nov. 2017. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24692921.2017.1380777

“The Aftermath of War.” In The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945-1975. Vol. 9. Ed. Clare Hanson and Susan Watkins. Series editor Cora Kaplan and Jennie Batchelor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 142-58.

“‘A Happy Heritage’: Children’s Poetry Books and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival.” The Lion and the Unicorn 37.3 (2013): 207-37.

“Illustrating Mary Poppins: Visual Culture and the Middlebrow.” In Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960. Ed. Mary Grover and Erica Brown. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 187-201.

Work in Progress

“An Ideal Modernity: Rural Britain, Women Artists, and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival.” Six chapter monograph recovers the work, lives, and publishing histories of four extraordinary but now largely forgotten women artists, the wood engravers, book designers, and writers (English), Joan Hassall (English), Clare Leighton (English and American), and Agnes Miller Parker (Scottish). Integrating methods of research and interpretation derived from biography, geography, social and art history, literary, media, and cultural studies, it reveals how an imaginary, idealized nation represented by delicate wood engravings modelled on the work of the eighteenth-century Newcastle engraver, Thomas Bewick, is relevant for twenty-first-century studies of twentieth-century British modernism, rural modernity, children’s literature, and book and women’s history.

“‘I was then happy’: Thomas Bewick, Book Illustration and the Making of Children’s Classics.” What is a children’s classic? This monograph approaches this theoretical question through analysis of the history and impact of black and white illustration on texts we’ve come to regard as classics of Golden Age British children’s literature. With a title that echoes Jane Eyre’s words about Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds and an introduction grounded in examination of the innovations and legacy of this eighteenth-century wood engraver, the chapters tell a story about history, design, and dreams of nation in illustrated books by Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Carroll, A. A. Milne, Arthur Ransome, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. H. White, and P. L. Travers, among others.

Multimedia

Monmouth Now:

Professor Bluemel to Deliver Guest Lecture at Kansas State University

Professor Bluemel is Invited Speaker at British Academy Conference

Professor Bluemel Brings ‘Blitz Writing’ to 21st Century Readers

An Academic Minute, WAMC:

https://www.wamc.org/post/dr-kristin-bluemel-monmouth-university-female-wood-engravers

Presentations/Invited Talks

Invited blog post, “Clare Leighton and the Fine Art of Mass Reproduction,” R.A.W.- Rediscovering Art by Women. February 10, 2023. https://r-a-w.net/blog/clare-leighton-and-the-fine-art-of-mass-reproduction/

“St John’s Wood and the Hundred Acre Wood: The Urban Illustration E. H. Shepard.” Co-Sponsored Allied Organization Panel: Modernist Studies Association and Children’s Literature Association. MLA 23. San Francisco, CA, Covid deferred to January 5-8, 2023.

Conference Panels Organized: “Streetwise: Children’s Literature and Culture in the Modern City.” ChLA/MSA Co-Sponsored Allied Organization Special Session. Modern Language Association Annual Meeting. Washington D.C., 6-9 January 2022. Covid deferred to January 5-8, 2023.

One-Day Symposium Sponsored, Organized and Moderated: “Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures Symposium”. Leverhulme Symposium, co-sponsored by the Northern Modernism Seminar and Newcastle University School of English. Newcastle University, October 15, 2022.

“Spades and Gravers: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz and the Radical Countryside.” Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures Symposium. Leverhulme Symposium, co-sponsored by the Northern Modernism Seminar and Newcastle University School of English. Newcastle University, October 15, 2022. https://www.monmouth.edu/news/prof-bluemel-to-lead-gardens-in-the-gorse-seminar-in-newcastle-england/

“A Doctor, a Rabbit, and Noom: The Fantastic Modernities of 1922’s Bestselling Children’s Books.” MSA 22: Making Modernism: 1922: A Hundred Years On.” Portland, OR, October 27-30, 2022.

“Beatrix Potter in Egypt: A Future for Rural Nostalgia.” The Child of the Future. St. John’s College, Cambridge University. Virtual conference, 30 June – 1 July 2022.

Forthcoming

“Enchanted Wood: Women Artists, Rural Britain, and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival.” This feminist study recovers the work, lives, and publishing histories of four extraordinary but now largely forgotten women artists, the wood engravers, book designers, and writers (English), Joan Hassall (English), Clare Leighton (English and American), and Agnes Miller Parker (Scottish). Integrating methods of research and interpretation derived from biography, geography, social and art history, literary, media, and cultural studies, it reveals how an imaginary, idealized nation represented by delicate wood engravings modelled on the work of the eighteenth-century Newcastle engraver, Thomas Bewick, is relevant for twenty-first-century studies of twentieth-century British modernism, rural modernity, children’s literature, and book and women’s history.