Elizabeth Blake
Assistant Professor, English

Scholarly Interests
Modernism, Queer & Feminist Literature and Theory, Food Studies
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Professor Blake specializes in gender and sexuality studies, food studies, and global modernist literature. Her research focuses on the ways queer pleasure is represented in the literature of the early twentieth century, and how those representations come to reshape existing literary forms. Her first book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism's Queer Forms, demonstrates that scenes of eating in modernist literature are sites of queerness, depicting and enacting a kind of pleasure that exceeds normative models. She is also interested in the relationship between modernism and popular forms of cultural production, including cookbooks, dinner theatre, genre fiction, and women’s middlebrow fiction. Her second book project, tentatively entitled Against the Love Plot, traces the ways mid-twentieth century women’s fiction resists both normative models of love and normative plotlines that end in marriage.
Professor Blake’s courses include: Queer Modernisms; Modernist Literature; Reading Voraciously: Food and Literature in the 20th Century; Virginia Woolf; Queer Literature; British Literature II; and Writing the Thesis.
Degrees
- Ph.D., Cornell University, 2016
- M.A., University of Chicago, 2009
- B.A., Reed College, 2004
Affiliated Department(s)
- English Department
- Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies (CGRAS)
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Scholarly and Creative Works
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Adaptive kinship: Jane Rule’s domestic geographies of care
Published in Journal of Lesbian Studies
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2021
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Vol. 25
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Issue #3
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Queering the Marriage Plot: Gale Wilhelm’s Middlebrow Modernism
Published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
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2020
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Vol. 37
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Issue #1
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Middle-burner Modernism: Alice Toklas's Culinary Aesthetics
Published in Modernism/modernity (PrintPlus)
May
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2019
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Vol. 4
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Issue #2
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Domesticating Gertrude Stein, or, "banal queerness": reading "Lifting Belly" alongside "What Happened" and "A Play Called Not and Now"
Published in Feminist Modernist Studies
September
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2019
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Vol. 2
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Issue #3
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Obscene Hungers: eating and enjoying Nightwood and Ulysses
Published in The Comparatist
October
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2015
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Vol. 39
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Awards & Grants
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Space Between Society Essay Prize
Space Between Society
2022
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