Research and Scholarship

 

Books, Introductions, and Editions

 

The Portrait’s Subject tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during the nineteenth century. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, The Portrait’s Subject examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices across the nineteenth century, from daguerreotype to X-ray.

“Collating a wide array of materials—from the changing figuration of a self-emancipated Black man in The North Star’s masthead and Thomas Eakins’s paintings to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Henry James’s portrait fiction—Blackwood’s book meticulously documents the real and imagined portraits that made it possible for Americans to understand themselves, in ways never before, as psychologically “deep.” — Erica Fretwell, New England Quarterly

“In energetic prose, The Portrait’s Subject presents a perceptive account of the intermingling of science and cultural expression in the nineteenth century. It uses historical revision to unsettle assumptions about the relationship between “inner” and “outer” life”— E. Thomas Finan, the Henry James Review

 
 

Scholarly Articles, Chapters, Reviews

  • “Keeping Watch.” Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance. Eds. Sophie Hamacher and Jessica Hankey. (MIT Press, 2023). Reviewed and quoted in Jia Tolentino’s “The Hidden Pregnancy Experiment,” The New Yorker, May 4, 2024.

  • “The Group (Text) or, the Small Stuff.” Feminists Reclaim Mentorship. Eds. Tahneer Oksman and Nancy K. Miller. (SUNY Press, 2023).

  • “The Visual Rhetorics of Selfhood in Early Black Narrative and Art." African American Literature in Transition, Vol. 2. Jasmine Cobb, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2021). (Series editor: Joycelyn Moody)

  • Respondent to Shari Goldberg’s “Newland Archer’s Doubled Consciousness: Wharton, Psychology, Narrational Form.” In “New Centenary Essays Roundtable” edited by Arielle Zibrak. Edith Wharton Review 39.2 (2021): 194-196.

  • “The Function of Pettiness at the Present Time.” Co-written with Sarah Mesle. ASAP Journal (July 2017).

  • “‘Making Good Use of Our Eyes’: Nineteenth-Century African Americans Write Visual Culture.” MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States 39.2 (Summer 2014): 1-24.

  • "'So Difficult to Instruct': Re-envisioning Abraham and Tad Lincoln." Common-Place 13.4 (Summer 2013). Multimedia essay.

  • Review essay: “Seeing Black.” American Quarterly 65.4 (December 2013): 927 936. Books reviewed: Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum; Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle; Maurice Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity; Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery.

  • “Isabel Archer’s Body.” The Henry James Review 31.3 (Fall 2010): 271-280.

  • "Psychology.” Henry James in Context. David McWhirter, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 270-280. Invited book chapter.

  • “Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology.” American Literature 81.1 (March 2009): 93-126.

  • “‘The Inner Brand’: Emily Dickinson, Portraiture, and the Narrative of Liberal Interiority.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 14.2 (Fall 2005): 48-59. Republished in Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson. J. Brooks Bouson, ed. (Pasadena: Salem Press), 2012.