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

Her 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, Aftenposten Innsikt, and more.

Blum has 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.” Her public-facing essays have appeared in Aeon, The New Yorker.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, and more.

Blume's 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 20th and 21st-first century authors. A third project unearths the experimental modernist ideals that inspired the rise of corporate sensitivity training.

She currently serves as the British and Anglophone book reviews editor for the journal Contemporary Literature.