Laura Goldblatt headshot

Laura Goldblatt

Assistant Professor, General Faculty

Degrees

PhD University of Virginia
 
MA University of Virginia
 
BA Wesleyan University

Interests

     Laura Goldblatt is a literary and cultural studies scholar of state propaganda and material culture in the twentieth-century United States. Additionally, she has written about the university as a critical site of activist intervention and the impact of its built environment and labor practices on local housing markets and economic precarity. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly, the Journal of American Studies, Social Text, Winterthur Portfolio, Pedagogy, Works and Days, and an edited volume about the August 12th, 2017 violence in Charlottesville. She is currently at work on two monographs. The first, After Destiny: Propaganda, Settler Colonialism, and Community, explores the reception of state-sponsored reproductions of literary and popular texts about U.S. national expansion that were used for propagandistic purposes. Yet rather than focusing on the formal features of the artifacts themselves, she examines their use value for groups dispossessed by the logic of late capitalism, such as Native and Black Americans, during the long twentieth century. Additionally, along with Professor of Anthropology Richard Handler, she is writing a monography about twentieth-century U.S. postage stamps that takes moral circulation as its theme.

Book chapters

“ ‘Your Safety is My Foremost Concern’: Lessons from Charlottesville on Vulnerability and Protection.” In #Charlottesville: Before and After. OR Books. Summer 2018.

Recent articles

“Unprofessional.” With Bennett Carpenter and Lenora Hanson. Social Text, special issue: “Educational Undergrowth” (forthcoming, Spring 2020).
 
“Toward a New National Iconography: Native Americans on United States Postage Stamps, 1863-1922.” With Richard Handler. Winterthur Portfolio (Summer 2017): 55-79.
 
“Schol…Exodus?: Learning Within/Against/Beyond the Institution.” With Bennett Carpenter et. al. Works and Days in collaboration with Cultural Logic, special issue: Scholactivism: Reflections on Transforming Praxis in and Beyond the Classroom (2016-2017): 153-167.
 
“ ‘Can’t Repeat the Past?’: Gatsby and The American Dream at Mid-Century.” Journal of American Studies (Summer 2015): 105-124.
 
“Feces on the Philosophy of History! A Manifesto of the MLA Subconference.” With Bennett Carpenter et. al. Pedagogy (Fall 2014): 381-393.
 
“ ‘If I could say’: Voice and Community During the Summer of Faulkner.” Mississippi Quarterly (Summer 2013): 487-506.

Honors

Provost’s Office Award for Collaborative Excellence in Public Service (Spring 2020)
 
Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority, Board of Commissioners, July 2019-present
 
$25,000 Flash Funding grant for one-day conference on universities and gentrification in partnership with the Charlottesville Public Housing Association of Residents (Fall 2017)
 
Buckner W. Clay Grant for the Grassroots Humanities Institute, Institute of Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia (Academic year 2017-2018)
 
All-University Graduate Teaching Assistant Award in the Arts and Humanities, (Academic year 2013-2014)
 
Bradley Fellow, Department of English, University of Virginia (Academic year 2013-2014)