Christine Blouch

Biography

Dr. Christine Blouch is director of International Programs at Bradley University and an associate professor of English. Before her academic life, she worked in Chicago for the weekly newspaper Chicago Reader. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation on early eighteenth-century novelist Eliza Haywood won the Department of English award for outstanding dissertation. She started at Bradley in 1992. Dr. Blouch was named Professor of the Year in 1994 by Sigma Tau Delta, the national English majors honorary. In 2007, she received Bradley University’s highest teaching distinction, the Putnam Award.  

Teaching

Dr. Blouch’s courses include Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature, which she has taught both as a stand-alone course, and with Dr. Tim Conley as a joint course on Eighteenth-Century Literature in America and Britain. Other courses she has taught include Studies in Women Writers, the Novel as Genre, the History of the Mystery, the Brontës and Emily Dickenson, Detective Fiction, and graduate courses on the eighteenth century and Gothic Sensibilities, among other courses. She has also taught ENG 190, 300, 301, 320, 378, and Western Civilization.

Until 2005, when she was named director of International Programs, Dr. Blouch taught extensively in Bradley’s European Summer Semester and Interim Abroad programs, including courses in Malta, Belgium, Munich, Austria, and Madrid. She also taught several courses in London, including London in Literature and the 300-level course Writing About Travel. 

Scholarship

Dr. Blouch’s publications include editing two volumes of the six-volume series Selected Works of Eliza Haywood (Pickering & Chatto, 2000, 2001). Her article “‘What Ann Lang Read’: Eliza Haywood and her Readers,” appeared in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood (University Press of Kentucky, 2000). Her edition of Haywood’s The History of Miss Betty Thoughtless (1751) was published by Broadview Press in 1999. Previous articles include one in Studies in English Literature and an introduction in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. With Dr. Laurie Vickroy, she is co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Dorothy Allison, published in 2005.

Dr. Blouch has served on the Women’s Studies Committee, Peoria Area Friends of International Students, the Peoria World Affairs Council, and as faculty advisor to Sigma Tau Delta, to the Bradley Feminist Society, and to Common Ground, Bradley’s organization for GLBT students and allies. She has also participated in a number of department and University committees.