Dr. Jon Blandford

Jon BlandfordAssociate Professor, English
Director of the Honors Program
Ph.D., Indiana University, 2011
Office: Alumni 210
Email: jblandford@bellarmine.edu

Jon Blandford is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Honors Program at Bellarmine University. His research interests include U.S. crime literature, law and literature, and the literatures of slavery and abolition. In addition to the Early American survey he teaches every fall, Dr. Blandford has offered courses covering a variety of subjects, ranging from canonical works such as Moby-Dick to the pulp detective fiction of the early twentieth century. He is the author of a book chapter on the memoirs of eighteenth-century con man Stephen Burroughs, and of forthcoming book chapters on spectacle in nineteenth-century American law and culture and late-nineteenth century women’s detective fiction. In May of 2015, he received an academic research grant from Sisters in Crime, a non-profit organization committed to promoting scholarship that contributes to our understanding of the role of the voices of writers sometimes marginalized in the crime fiction genre. In June of 2016, he participated in a week-long seminar on slave narratives at Yale University co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

When not doing the things an English professor does—e.g., reading, grading, stroking his beard contemplatively when students say smart things in class—Dr. Blandford enjoys running, listening to music at inappropriately loud decibel levels, and spending time with his wife and daughter. An avid, long-suffering baseball fan, Dr. Blandford is holding out hope that the Cincinnati Reds will win another World Series at some point in his lifetime.

Select Publications and Presentations

  • “Spectacular Judgments: Law and Disorder in the Nineteenth-Century Visual Imagination” in Routledge Research Companion to Law and Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America, eds. Nan Goodman and Simon Stern (Routledge, forthcoming 2017).
  • “Home and Away: Reinvestigating Domestic Detective Fiction,” in Cambridge History of American Crime Fiction, ed. Christopher Raczkowski (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2017).
  • “Marie Roget in the Suburbs.” American Literature Association Symposium, “The City and American Literature.” New Orleans, Louisiana. Fall 2015.
  • “Rethinking Gothic Temporality: Beloved’s Ghost on Legree’s Plantation.” 112th Annual Conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association.  Riverside, California.  Fall 2014.
  • “Stephen Burroughs, Serial Offender: Formula and Fraud in Early U.S. Crime Literature,” in Murder by Series: Studies in Serial Crime Fiction, eds. Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti (Palgrave Macmilllian, 2015).       
  • “Genre and Judgment in Catharine Williams’s Fall River. American Literature Association Annual Conference. Washington, D.C.  May 2014. 
  • “Fishing for Words: Language as Resource in McCarthy’s The Road and Hemingway’s ‘The Big Two-Hearted River.’” American Literature Association Symposium, “Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Their Traditions.” New Orleans, Louisiana. Fall 2012.
  • “Buyers and Cellars: The Economy of an Underground Plot.” American Literature Association Symposium, “Mysterious America: Crime Fiction in American Culture.” Savannah, Georgia. Fall 2011.