Amy Blair // English // Marquette University

Associate Professor

English

Amy L. Blair is an associate professor of English at Marquette University and is co-editor, with James Machor, of the journal Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, the official journal of the Reception Study Society. Dr. Blair's 2012 book Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States, was published by Temple University Press under the auspices of the Andrew Mellon Foundation-funded American Literatures Initiative. Reading Up investigates, through the lens of a reading advice column that ran for the decade between 1902 and 1912 in the Ladies' Home Journal magazine, the way readerly desires for social, cultural, and financial capital affected readers' reception of the canonical works of American literary realism and the less-celebrated, genteel literary bestselling fiction of the day. Dr. Blair's work in progress, Tasting and Testing Books, studies Emily Newell Blair’s reading advice in Good Housekeeping magazine during the 1920s and 1930s in the frame of the magazine’s“money-back guarantee” mindset. Dr. Blair has also been named volume editor for The Gods Arrive in The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Courses Taught

American Literature

Women's Studies

Literature and Popular Culture

Research Interests

Late 19th and Early 20th-century American Literature

Early and New Republic-Era American Literature

History of the Book

Reception Studies

History of American Periodicals

Class and Gender Studies

Publications

"Tasting and Testing Books: Good Housekeeping’s Literary Canon for the 1920s and 1930s.” REAL -Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 31 (2015): 167-83.

"American Readers and Their Novels.” Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 6: The American Novel 1879-1940. Eds. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.

Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century, Temple University Press, 2012

“Main Street Reading Main Street.” New Directions in American Reception Study. Eds. Philip Goldberg and James Machor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

“Research Strategies on Women, Popular Culture, and Family Life in America, 1800-1920: Making Use of the Periodicals from the Everyday Life and Women in America Collection.” Everyday Life and Women in America. London: Adam Matthew Publications, 2006.

“Misreading The House of Mirth.” American Literature 76:1 (2004): 149-175.

“Rewriting Heroines: Ruth Todd’s ‘Florence Grey,’ Society Pages, and the Rhetorics of Success.” Studies in American Fiction 30:1 (2002): 103-128.

Honors and Awards

National Humanities Center Summer Institute participant, 2005

Summer Faculty Fellowship, Marquette University, 2004, 2005, 2006

Regular Research Grant, Marquette University, 2006

Faculty Development Grant, Graduate School, Marquette University (For travel to the Material Cultures Conference at the Center for the Book, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2005)

Faculty hall-STAR Award, Residence Hall Honor Society, 2004 and 2007

Additional Information

Office Hours

Fall 2024

MW 11:30-1:30

Teaching Schedule

Fall 2024

4615/101 MWF 9:00-9:50 Lalumiere Hall 198