Melissa M. Mowry, PhD

Welcome! I am a scholar and professor specializing in 17th and 18th century British literature and culture.  My work focuses on the complex intersections between politics and imaginative writing of the period when Britain was in the grips of civil wars and actively shaping its colonial ambitions.  Across my career, my scholarship has been centrally concerned with the interactions between politics, literature, and literary history. Specifically, my work seeks to rethink how literary history constructs knowledge by focusing on collectivity and community rather than individual writers or works.  Such a reorientation towards collectivity is often the only way we can come to know the non-elite women and men upon whom eighteenth-century writers focused their imaginative works, but who were themselves often intentionally pushed to the literate margins of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture and who left little in the way of textual traces.

My scholarship has appeared in leading journals such as ELH, The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, and the Huntington Library Quarterly.  Additionally, I served as co-editor for Genders from 2007-2009.

Fellowships:

I have held fellowships from the Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Awards

My dissertation, (Re)Productive Histories: Epistolary Fiction and the Origin of the English Novel (University of Delaware) was the recipient of the Wilbur Owen Sypherd Award for the Best Dissertation in the Humanities (1994).

My article "'Past Remembrance or History': Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter, or, How the Collective Lost Its Honor" was the recipient of ASECS's James L. Clifford Award (2013).