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Biography
James Bjork-LaPlante (he/him), holds a MA in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he specialized in information literacy and archives education. As an educator, he is passionate about empowering students to engage with and utilize library and archives resources effectively in their academic research and daily lives. He is currently enrolled as a graduate student in the MA/PhD program in Literary Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A comprehensive overview of his professional background can be found in his CV, which is available on this page.
Research Interests
Print Culture, History of the Book, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature, Popular Literature and Pulp Studies, Social Identity Formation, Gender Studies, LGBTQIA+ Literature, Migration Studies, American Literature, the Atlantic World
Research Description
James Bjork-LaPlante's research focuses on the relationships between social identity development, literature, and print culture in the United States and Atlantic World during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Previously, he has written on the development of the Weird Fiction genre in American popular literature and the role that Arkham House Publishers played in its transition from pulp serials to hardcover books during the mid-twentieth century. Most recently, he is exploring the popular literature written by, for, and/or about homosexual men during the first half of the twentieth century as well as the communities of print that emerged to support the creation, publication, and distribution of these, often subversive, works during the period.