Angie Blumberg

Education

Ph.D. in English, Saint Louis University

M.A. in Victorian Studies, University of Leicester, UK

About Me

Angie Blumberg earned her Ph.D. in English in May 2017 from Saint Louis University (SLU), specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth century British and Irish literature and culture. At SLU, she earned the Fournier Award in Teaching Excellence, awarded annually to the top graduate student instructor in the English department. After completing a Visiting Fellowship at the DePaul Humanities Center (Chicago, IL) in spring 2018, she came to Auburn as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the English department. She was awarded the Postdoctoral Teaching Award in January 2021. Angie is now a lecturer. Her first monograph, British Literature and Archaeology, 1880-1930, came out with Manchester University Press in 2022. The book uncovers archaeology at the center of debates about gender and sexuality, aesthetic form, authenticity, and the First World War.

Her current research project examines examines travel writing, maps, illustrations, and photographs by British women explorers and archaeologists—including Bell, Isabella Bird Bishop, Ella Sykes, and Vita Sackville-West traveling in the Near East from 1830-1930. This project uncovers neglected women writers and modes, reorients our approach to the genre of travel writing, and reveals how women travelers understood and shaped the political ecologies of the Near East across the long turn of the twentieth century.

Secondary projects include explorations of ecological discourse in late-Victorian fantasy (e.g., “Decadent Ecological Bodies in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Fisherman and His Soul,’” forthcoming in Victorian Fantastic Bodies, Wayne State University Press) and a new project on Gothic Modernisms, currently focused on stories by Mary Butts and Elizabeth Bowen. 

Honors and Awards

Honor Your Teaching Fellowship for the creation of an Honors course, Auburn University, 2023
Postdoctoral Teaching Award, Auburn University English Department. 2021
Visiting Fellowship, DePaul Humanities Center. January – June 2018

Research Interests

19th and 20th century British and Irish literature and cultural history; gender and sexuality studies; aestheticism; decadence; modernism; material culture and museum studies

Publications

• British Literature and Archaeology, 1880-1930. Manchester University Press, September 2022. 
• “Decadent Ecological Bodies in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Fisherman and His Soul.’” Victorian Fantastic Bodies, edited by Francesca Arnavas. Wayne State University Press. Forthcoming 2027.
• “Vernon Lee’s Archaeological Fantasies and Ghostly Mapmaking.” The Tales of Archaeology. Published Proceedings of The Tales of Archaeology: Towards a Literary “Memory Map” of the Mediterranean Space” Conference. Rome, Italy, September 2021. Academia Belgica Series. Forthcoming 2023.
• “Gertrude Bell in the Fin-de-Siècle Near East: Decadent Landscapes and Political Ecologies.” Invited contribution to Victorian Studies Special Conference Issue 64.4, February, 2023.
• “Muses and Misogyny in Decadent Modernism.” Invited contribution to #MeToo and Modernism, edited by Jerrica Jordan and Robin Field. Clemson University Press, 2023.
• “Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures and Fin-de-Siècle Decadence.” Feminist Modernist Studies 4.2, 2021. Invited contribution to special issue devoted to Global Decadence, edited by Dennis Denisoff.
• “Remembering Mrs. Potiphar: Victorian Reclamations of a Biblical Temptress.” Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt, edited by Eleanor Dobson. Manchester University Press, 2020. 
• “Mary Butts and the ‘War-fairy-tale’: Femininity, Archaeology, and Great War Rhetoric in Ashe of Rings.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 28.2, Fall 2019.
• “‘Something Vile in the Composition’: Marie Corelli’s Ziska, Decadent Portraiture, and the New Woman.” Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier. Anthem Press. April 2019.
• “Victorian Literature and Archaeology: Contemporary Excavations.” Commissioned article for Literature Compass. February 2018.
• “Strata of the Soul: The Queer Archaeologies of Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde.” Victoriographies 7.3. 2017. Special Issue: “Strata: Geology, Archaeology, and Psychology in Victorian and Edwardian Literature.” Edited by Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks.

Courses Taught

British Literature after 1789

World Literature after 1600

English Composition I and II