Dr Caroline Blinder
Staff details
Dr. Caroline Blinder is Reader in American Literature and Culture with a specialism in the intersections between photography and literature. She has published widely on European and United States photography in the 20th century – from work on Walker Evans and James Agee to Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes – to more contemporary photo-textual collaborations by Richard Misrach and Robert Frank. She regularly reviews for Modernism/modernity (Johns Hopkins U.P.), Journal of American Studies (Cambridge U.P.) amongst others and acts as a reader for Palgrave Macmillan and Bloomsbury Press. She has given papers and lectures at numerous public-facing institutions: the Photographers’ Gallery in London, The BBC, The University of Copenhagen, The Center for Modernism and Art at the University of Turin, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, amongst others. Caroline is currently working on a longer project on the role of polaroid photography and on environmentalism and landscape photography globally.
Academic qualifications
- Ph.D King's College London 1995
- M.A. Northwestern University, Chicago 1990
- B.A. English Literature, Tufts University, Boston 1988
Teaching and Supervision
Since starting at Goldsmiths, Caroline has consistently supervised doctoral projects and post graduate research . She has supervised research on Post-Colonial Representations of the Desert in Anglo-phone literature, British Women Detective Writers, Radical Aesthetics in the work of Henry Miller and Ezra Pound, and The Role of Thanatos in Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, to name a few.
- Modern American Fiction - 2nd and 3rd year option
- English and Creative Writing
- MA in Literature Studies - American Literature and Culture Pathway
- American Science Fiction - Post 1950s
- American Crime Fiction - Undergraduate option
- Dustbowl to Dreamfactory: Writing and Visual Culture during the Depression
Research interests
Most of my research in the last decade has centered on 20th and 21st century documentary photography – from the 1930s onwards - and how the camera operates as a metaphor for the visionary abilities of the artist and as a democratising art-form. I have thus written extensively on representations of the quotidian and on how photography has been used to consolidate the place of the everyman/woman within modernist practice. I am particularly interested in how captions, introductions, and accompanying text operate in books of photography and in the mechanisms traceable in the sequencing and ordering of images and text.
I am currently working on a longer project on the role of polaroid photography - conceptually and practically in post 1970s art practice and continuing my interest in how photography emerges in popular culture – television as well as cinema. My chapter on True Detective and The American Sublime and a work in progress on the tv series Hannibal and Still Life aesthetics forms part of what will be an edited collection on the politics of Television in the Netflix era. One of my more recent edited collections of essays is on American Landscape Photography; Imaging the Nation (The Journal of American Studies, 2017), which looks at the politics of race and class in more contemporary American landscape photography. Part of my contribution was on the photographer Richard Misrach's images of ecologically damaged sites in the South - a project that I am extending into a wider look at how painterly tropes, from the sublime to abstract expressionism, come into play in landscape photography that deals with the aftereffects of industrialisation - both in terms of borders and migration more globally, sites marked by historical trauma, and by toxicity and waste.
Publications and research outputs
Book
Blinder, Caroline. 2019. The American Photo-Text 1930-1960. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9781474404129
Blinder, Caroline. 2006. A Kind of Patriotism: Jack Kerouac's Introduction to Robert Frank's The Americans. Rodopi. ISBN 9042016981
Blinder, Caroline. 2005. Its Beautiful Visual Entirety: Kerouac's introduction to Frank's The Americans. Cambridge Scholars Press. ISBN 1904303463
Blinder, Caroline. 2000. A Selfmade Surrealist – Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work of Henry Miller. NC: Camden House. ISBN 978-1571131331
Edited Book
Blinder, Caroline, ed. 2010. New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230102927
Book Section
Blinder, Caroline. 2017. Ruses and Ruminations: The Architecture of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Michael A. Lofaro, ed. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 9781621902614
Blinder, Caroline. 2017. ‘Ruses and Ruminations: The Architecture of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’. In: Michael Lofaro, ed. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75. Knoxville: U. of Tennessee Press.
Blinder, Caroline. 2016. Fragments of the Future: Walker Evans’s Polaroids. In: Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland, eds. Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-0180-8
Blinder, Caroline. 2012. James Agee. In: Mark Durden and Henry Bond, eds. Fifty Key Writers on Photography. London: Routledge, pp. 3-7. ISBN 978-0415549455
Blinder, Caroline. 2012. Sitting Pretty: Municipal Chairs in the Photography of Doisneau and Kertész. In: , ed. The Everyday in Modernist Practice. London: European Modernism Association.
Blinder, Caroline. 2012. Through an American Lens : Camera Work (1903-17); 291 (1915-16); Manuscripts (1922-3). In: Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume II: North America 1894-1960. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 271-292. ISBN 9780199545810
Blinder, Caroline. 2012. Wright Morris. In: Mark Durden, ed. Fifty Key Writers on Photography. London: Routledge, pp. 175-180. ISBN 978-0415549455
Blinder, Caroline. 2011. ‘Brassaï’s Chair , Henry Miller and The Eye of Paris’. In: Natasha Gregorian, ed. Text and Image Relations in Modern European Culture. Indiana: U. of Purdue Press.
Blinder, Caroline. 2011. Sitting Pretty: Modernism and the Municipal Chair in the Photographs of André Kertész and Robert Doisneau. In: Sascha Bru; Laurence Nuijs; Benedikt Hjartarson; Peter Nicholls; Tania Ørum and Hubert Berg, eds. Regarding the Popular : Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture. (2) Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 191-204. ISBN 9783110274691
Blinder, Caroline. 2010. Animating the Gudgers : On the Problems of a Cinematic Aesthetic in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In: Caroline Blinder, ed. New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans : Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 145-164. ISBN 9780230102927
Blinder, Caroline. 2010. Introduction. In: Caroline Blinder, ed. New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-22. ISBN 978-0230102927
Blinder, Caroline. 2009. The Bachelor’s Drawer: Art and Artefact in the Work of Wright Morris. In: Mick Gidley, ed. Writing With Light – Words and Photographs in American Texts. London: Peter Lang, pp. 63-81. ISBN 978-3039115723
Blinder, Caroline. 2009. ‘Not so Innocent: Vision and Culpability in Weegee’s Photographs of Children’. In: Marlene Kadar; Jeanne Perreault and Linda Warley, eds. Photographs, Histories, and Meanings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 9-25. ISBN 978-0230617704
Blinder, Caroline. 2008. All things Either Good or Ungood: American Pictures Revisited in Jacob Holdt’s United States 1970-1975. In: Brett Rogers, ed. Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2008. London: Photographers' Gallery, pp. 69-72. ISBN 978-0907879831
Blinder, Caroline. 2006. Entries on Anais Nin, Erskine Caldwell, and Surrealism. In: Gaëtan Brulotte and John Phillips, eds. The Encyclopaedia of Erotic Literature. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1579584412
Blinder, Caroline. 2006. A Kind of Patriotism: Jack Kerouac's Introduction to Robert Frank's The Americans. In: Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fatima Lambert, eds. Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image. (95) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 235-244. ISBN 9042016981
Blinder, Caroline. 2005. Entries on André Breton, Jack Kerouac, and Edgar Allan Poe. In: Bill Marshall, ed. France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (Transatlantic Relations). ABC –Clio Publications. ISBN 978-1851094110
Blinder, Caroline. 2005. Its Beautiful Visual Entirety: Kerouac's introduction to Frank's The Americans. In: D. Cunningham; A. Fisher and S. Mays, eds. Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 109-122. ISBN 1904303463
Blinder, Caroline. 2005. ‘Love Under the Sky: On Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac’. In: Rui Carvalho Homen and Maria d Fatima Lambert, eds. Writing and Seeing: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 215-234.
Blinder, Caroline. 1999. ‘Between the Unimagined and the Imagined: Photographic Aesthetics and Literary Illumination in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’. In: Wim Tigges, ed. Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Brill | Rodopi. ISBN 978-9042006362
Article
Blinder, Caroline. 2020. Richard Misrach and Kate Orff's Petrochemical America: Cartographies of the Picturesque. Journal of American Studies, 54(3), pp. 582-603. ISSN 0021-8758
Blinder, Caroline and Lloyd, Christopher. 2020. US Topographics: Imaging National Landscapes. Journal of American Studies, 54(3), pp. 461-469. ISSN 0021-8758
Blinder, Caroline. 2018. Looking for Harlem: The absent Narrator in Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes' The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955). CoSMo - Comparative Studies in Modernism(13), ISSN 2281-6658
Blinder, Caroline. 2017. The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia - The Phototext in the 19th and 20th century. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature,
Blinder, Caroline. 2016. American Alphabet: Photo-Textual Politics in Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall's Time in New England (1950). Journal of American Studies, 50(1), pp. 143-165. ISSN 0021-8758
Blinder, Caroline. 2013. The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League 1936–1951: Mason Klein and Catherine Evans (eds). Photography and Culture, 6(1), pp. 107-112. ISSN 1751-4517
Blinder, Caroline. 2005. `Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places': Brassaï in André Breton's 'Mad Love'. History of Photography, 29(2), pp. 114-122. ISSN 03087298
Blinder, Caroline. 2004. The Transparent Eyeball: On Emerson and Walker Evans. Mosaic, 37(4), pp. 149-163. ISSN 00271276
Blinder, Caroline. 1998. La Révolte Enfantine: On Georges Bataille's “La Morale de Miller” and Jean-Paul Sartre's “Un Nouveau Mystique”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 40(1), pp. 39-47. ISSN 0011-1619
Blinder, Caroline. 1993. 'A Deadly Fascination: Heterology and Fascism in the Writings of Georges Bataille, Yukio Mishima, and Henry Miller'. Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 2, ISSN 1133-309-X
Further profile content
Featured publications
2019:
No Ideas but in Seeing: On Jim Jarmusch's Paterson
Reading of Jarmusch's 2016 film and its vernacular and aesthetic connections to William Carlos Williams' Poem
2020:
Richard Misrach and Kate Orff's Petrochemical America: Cartographies of the Picturesque
Misrach and Orff's Petrochemical America charts the political and ecological fall out of cancer alley in the U.S. This chapter looks at the use of the picturesque and its purpose politically
2016:
Fragments of the Future: Walker Evans' Polaroids
An examination into Walker Evans' late polaroids, particularly his use of signage and objects as a way to return to his interest in the vernacular debris of American culture
2017:
Ruses and Ruminations: The architecture of James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Focusing on the 'Alter' section of the famous collaboration, this reading looks at how architectural dimensions are both internal and structural to the novel and its modernist credentials
Media engagements
2019:
Photobooks: The Book Club Test
Source Photographic Review short film on iconic photo-books
Conferences and talks
2019:
'An Unmade Book: Walker Evans' 1970s Polaroids of Letters'
Paper given at Commitment, Memory, Materiality and the Art Market, Maison Francaise, Oxford U. 2019
2016: 'Toxic Beauty' Topography and Aesthetics in Richard Misrach and Kate Orff's Petrochemical America, Queen's U. Belfast
2018: Culture Vulture: Dr. Lecter’s Ties and other Aesthetic Modes of Consumption in Hannibal, Madness in Popular Culture Conference, University of Edinburg
2015:
“Here I am”. The Vernacular Vision of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava in The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955),
Borders of the Visible: Intersections between literature and photography at ‘Centro Arti della Modernitá, University of Turin
Grants and awards
2019:
Terra Foundation Teaching Fellowship in Japan
A one year teaching professorship in Kyoto and Kobe at Doshisha and Kobe Universities teaching American Art History
2022:
Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellowship at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Arts, The National Gallery, Washington DC
Two month fellowship to access the Robert Frank Archives
Founding Fathers' Research Grant British Association of American Studies
Travel grant to access archival materials in the United States on Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke White
Postgraduate Supervision
I am keen to hear from potential candidates interested in the intersections between text and image and literature and photography more widely. My interest is both in United States work from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries but also in transatlantic projects - particularly with a Surrealist connection.
I've supervised projects on The Beat movement, Henry Miller, and other countercultural writers of the mid 20th century and on genre fiction, detective writing (British Women writers of Detective fiction), Travel Writing (From a Post-Colonial Angle looking at Anglophone narratives from the late 19th century and onwards), and Emerson's Transcendentalism in the context of 19th century economics and politics. At the moment I am supervising work on documentary film in the post war era and how this impacts identity politics in the Caribbean. Any proposals with an interest in the intersections between documentary aesthetics, politics and popular culture from the early 20th century onwards would be welcome as well
