Lynn Z. Bloom moved to the University of Connecticut, Storrs in 1988 to become Professor of English and the first Aetna (endowed) Chair of Writing, after directing writing at the University of New Mexico and the College of William and Mary. She also chaired the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been president of the national Council of Writing Program Administrators, chair of the Modern Language Association's Division of Teaching Writing, and is on the Board of Directors of the National Archives of Composition and Rhetoric, located at the University of New Hampshire.
Her work in composition studies includes "Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise" (College English Oct. 1996), Composition in the 21st Century: Crisis and Change (co-ed. Daiker, White, Southern Illinois University Press 1996), The Essay Connection: Readings for Writers (5th ed, Houghton Mifflin, Sept. 1997), and Fact and Artifact: Writing Nonfiction (Prentice Hall, 2nd ed 1994). "Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades" will be published in College Composition and Communication, Oct. 1997.
Her current research in composition studies, The Contemporary Essay Canon and American College Readers, is funded in part by the National Council of Teachers of English. With Animal Science professors Hoagland, Faustmann, and Reisen and a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. Bloom and Teaching Assistant Kim Freeman are developing a series of workshops and instructional materials to help faculty in all disciplines incorporate writing into their courses in ways that will enable students to write to learn the dimensions of the particular discipline with ease, efficiency, and effectiveness.
Dr. Bloom has also been working on biography and autobiography for over thirty years, beginning with her doctoral dissertation on How Literary Biographers Use Their Subjects' Writings: A Study of Biographical Method (University of Michigan, 1963). After discovering that biographers read all of their subjects' works--plays, poetry, novels, and satires-- as straight autobiography, she decided to see what she could learn by writing a biography herself. The result was Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical (Bobbs Merrill 1972), written with her two small children in the room. She says, "I couldn't say, `Go away, don't bother me. I'm writing about Doctor Spock.' So I learned to combine writing and teaching with family responsibilities, and have done so ever since."
Now she writes autobiography, as well, including "Teaching College English as a Woman" (1992) and "Growing Up with Dr. Spock" (1994). She has co-authored American Autobiography 1945-1980: A Bibliography (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), and edited two diaries of American women's experiences in Japanese internment camps during World War II, Natalie Crouter's Forbidden Diary (Burt Franklin, 1980) and Margaret Sams's Forbidden Family (U of Wisconsin Press, 1989). She is currently writing Coming to Life: Reading, Researching, Writing Autobiography.