Nicholas Bloechl

I am a PhD candidate whose research focuses on nineteenth-century American literatureand culture. Particular areas of interest include media studies, book history and the works of Herman Melville. The topic of my dissertation is American authorship at the invention of photography. Some questions that I ask myself are: How does the increased visibility of the author change the author’s relationship with the reader? How can we register this change in a work of literature? What kinds of claims does the author’s portrait make on a work of literature and vice versa? My research is guided by the idea that the introduction of the photographic portrait makes these questions more complicated and more insistent.

I have taught classes on writing, on text and image in the nineteenth century, and on the relationship between American literature and the city.

Education
M.A. New York University
B.A. Boston College

Presentations
“Out of Order: The Technologies of Edith Wharton’s Ghosts”​​​​Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the ALSCW, Catholic University,​Washington D.C. (10/19/2024)

“From Photogeny to Photogénie: Edgar Allan Poe and Jean Epsein’s‘Usher’”​​35th Annual Conference on American Literature (ALA), Chicago IL (05/24/2024)

“Emerson, Brady and the Uses of Monumental Portraiture:​​​​​34th Annual Conference on American Literature (ALA), Westin Copley Place,​ Boston, MA (05/27/2023)

“Reversing the Point: Jonathan Walker’s Branded Hand”​​​​Americanist Forum, Boston University, Boston MA (03/27/2023)

“Partial Portraits: The Photograph in Frederick Douglass’s Heroic Slave”​​​Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the ALSCW, Yale University, New Haven CT​(10/21/2022)

“Prophecy and Narrative Time in Moby-Dick”​​​​​​Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the ALSCW, Holy Cross, Worcester MA​(09/06/2019)

“Melville, Populism and the Civil War”​​​​​​Symposium on Populism and the Arts, Catholic University, Washington D.C.​(08/17/2019)

Publications
“Borne out of Sight: Childhood and the Limits of Figuration in Moby-Dick” Leviathan 24.2 (Summer, 2022) 

“Melville’s Lyrical Turn: Prophecies of Populism in Battle Pieces” Literary Imagination 24.2 (July, 2022)

Courses Taught
EN127: Reading American Literature
EN120: The City in U.S. Literature, 1840-1914
WR152: Mapping America in Word and Image: 19th c. to the Present
WR120: Mapping American in Nineteenth-Century Literature.