Jack Bradford

Jack Bradford is a PhD candidate in English. He is interested in American literature and film since 1900; genre, gender, and affect; and, broadly, the history of the English-language novel since 1700.

His dissertation is titled No Ordinary Man: Male Sentimentality and Genre Disintegration in American Culture. Male sentimentality laments the routine round of familial and occupational duties as incompatible with—rather than as the achievement of—the good life. This affective mode invites men to fantasize about their own exceptionality, even when they cannot help but undertake everyday responsibilities. Reading the works of figures like John Wayne, John Updike, Percival Everett, and Stephen Graham Jones, Bradford argues that men’s sentimental texts are characterized by promises of low-genre thrills—time travel, supernatural horror, Wild Western freedom—that collapse in on themselves. Here, genre forms and domestic realism, usually understood to be opposites, interpenetrate and subtend one another. Some of this work has been presented at the Modern Language Association, the Modernist Studies Association, and the Western Literature Association. He has also published an essay on Vladimir Nabokov, Ruth Ozeki, and the epistemology of first-person perspectives in contemporary fiction.

Bradford is an editorial assistant at the Virginia Quarterly Review. From 2024-2025, he was a copyeditor at New Literary History and president of the Graduate English Students Association. He earned his B.A. in English from Duke University, where he was a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar.

Publication:
“Document Style and Fictional Minds After Modernism,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 59, no. 1 (2026): 22-41.