Emily Dickinson Blake "Blakey" Vermeule (born July 14, 1966) is an American scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and theory of mind.^[1] She is a Professor of English at Stanford University.

Vermeule is the daughter of classicist Emily Vermeule and former Museum of Fine Arts curator Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III. Her brother, Adrian Vermeule, is a professor at Harvard Law School.^[2] Her wife is Terry Castle, also a professor of English at Stanford.^[3]

Her research interests include British literature from 1660–1800, critical theory, major British poets, post-Colonial fiction, the history of the novel, the cognitive underpinnings of fiction, and human evolutionary psychology. Her recent scholarship has focused on Darwinian literary studies.^[4][5] Vermeule previously taught at Northwestern University and Yale University.

In 2015, Vermeule co-founded the book review The New Rambler.^[6]

Ph.D. English Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 1995
B.A. English, summa cum laude, Yale University, 1988

• Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters (University of Chicago Press, 2018) ISBN 978-0-226-03223-8
• The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2000) ISBN 0-8018-6459-3
• Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (2009) ISBN 0-8018-9360-7