Professor
English and Modern Languages
College of Arts and Sciencesblackwell@hartford.edu 860.768.4941 A 212H
Education
PhD, Cornell University
MA, Cornell University
BA, Princeton University
Mark Blackwell earned an AB in English from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and won the Class of 1859 Prize for outstanding work on the senior thesis and the departmental exam. He received his PhD from Cornell University, where he was awarded the Guilford Essay Prize for the dissertation exhibiting the highest standard of excellence in English prose. Following four years at California State University, Chico, Blackwell came to the University of Hartford in 2001, where he has served as Chair of the English Department, Director of the University Honors Program, Director of the University Preceptor Program, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
An expert on eighteenth-century British literature and culture with a particular interest in the history of prose fiction, Blackwell has taught courses on Milton, satire, Austen, and talking things. In recent years, he has taught courses on grammar, on Shakespeare, and on contemporary fiction. Blackwell has also led first-year seminars entitled Castaways & Survivors and Humans & Humanoid Machines, offered honors seminars entitled Gothic Thrills, Humans & Animals, and Representing Death, and directed independent studies on the graphic novel and on contemporary fiction.
Blackwell’s articles have appeared in such journals as Restoration, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Romanticism, Philological Quarterly, Modern Philology, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. His essay on live-tooth transplantation, published in Eighteenth-Century Life, won the 2004-05 James L. Clifford Prize, awarded annually by the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies for an outstanding study of some aspect of eighteenth-century culture. Blackwell has edited a collection of scholarly essays entitled The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Bucknell University Press, 2007), and served as general editor of a four-volume edition of object and animal tales entitled British It-Narratives, 1750-1830 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012). He has also contributed a chapter on the relationship between eighteenth-century it-narratives and the tradition of metafictional writing, entitled “Extraordinary Narrators: Metafiction and It-Narratives,” to The Cambridge History of the English Novel (2012), a chapter on “Experimental Fictions” to Wiley-Blackwell’s Companion to the English Novel (2015), and a chapter on epic and mock-epic verse to Cambridge’s Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660-1714 (2019).