Biography

Laura Goldblatt is a literary and cultural studies scholar of state propaganda and material culture in the twentieth-century United States. Additionally, she has written about the university as a critical site of activist intervention and the impact of its built environment and labor practices on local housing markets and economic precarity. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly, the Journal of American Studies, Social Text, Winterthur Portfolio, Pedagogy, Works and Days, and an edited volume about the August 12th, 2017 violence in Charlottesville. She is currently at work on two monographs. The first, After Destiny: Propaganda, Settler Colonialism, and Community, explores the reception of state-sponsored reproductions of literary and popular texts about U.S. national expansion that were used for propagandistic purposes. Yet rather than focusing on the formal features of the artifacts themselves, she examines their use value for groups dispossessed by the logic of late capitalism, such as Native and Black Americans, during the long twentieth century. Additionally, along with Professor of Anthropology Richard Handler, she is writing a monography about twentieth-century U.S. postage stamps that takes moral circulation as its theme.