Beth Blum

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (2014)

Interests: Modern and contemporary literature; self-help and therapeutic culture; the history of reading; sociology; medical humanities; the conduct of life; temporality.

I am a scholar of modernist and contemporary literature whose work traverses the history of the humanities. My scholarship brings a literary, humanist perspective to the study of therapeutic culture: its longue durée history and contemporary iterations. I routinely teach courses on James Joyce, literary modernism, experimental criticism, anxiety, and Harvard fictions, among other subjects.

My first book, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching For Advice in Modern Literature (Columbia University Press, 2020) examines the global history of reciprocal influence between modern literature and self-help handbooks from the 19th century to the present. It was reviewed in international publications including Kirkus, The Nation, Publishers Weekly, Choice, The Baffler, Forge, The Wall Street Journal, Times Higher Education, NBC online, The New England Quarterly, The Hedgehog Review, Modern Language Quarterly, American Literary History, Haaretz Magazine, Svenska Dagbladet, Gama Revista, and Aftenposten Innsikt, and more. 

I have published academic essays in Modernism/Modernity, Modern Language Quarterly, PMLA, and American Literary History, as well as in edited collections such as Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, which offers reflections from leading scholars on the compatibility of literary studies with the pursuit of ‘the good life.’ My public-facing essays have appeared in Aeon, The New Yorker.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, and more. Links to many of these pieces are available on my website.

My current work (under contract) examines how the longstanding directive to “be present” or “be here now”—a theme uniting as diverse traditions as Stoicism, Buddhism, and Epicureanism—is inherited as both burden and consolation by twentieth and twenty-first century authors. 

I currently serve as the British and Anglophone book reviews editor for the journal Contemporary Literature. 

I welcome conversations with all students. Please sign up for office hours here.