Paula McDowell
Associate Professor of EnglishPh.D. Stanford University, 1991, B.A. University of British Columbia, Canada, 1982
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Paula McDowell specializes in 18th-century British literature and print culture and the History of the Book. With the support of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center, she has published The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford); Elinor James: Printed Writings (Ashgate); and articles on models of the Enlightenment, the epistemology of ephemera, the 18th-century novel, and many other topics. Her current book project, Fugitive Voices: Print Commerce and the Invention of Oral in Eighteenth-Century Britain, is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press; it examines the oral/literate binary as a heuristic -- a tool for understanding that itself has a history -- and argues that the concept of "oral culture" was in fact a back formation of the explosion of print commerce. Continuing this interest in the dynamic relationship between media forms, her next book project will be a study of John "Orator" Henley and the rise of public debating societies and commercialized oratory in the eighteenth century.
Areas of Research/Interest
Eighteenth-century British literature and cultural history; history of the book; media history and theory
Fellowships/Honors
Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award for The Women of Grub Street; National Humanities Center Fellowship; American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship; American Philosophical Society Research Grant; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Newberry Library; American Bibliographical Society Research Fellowship; United Kingdom Bibliographical Society Research Grant
Publications (Selected)
Fugitive Voices: Print Commerce and the Invention of the Oral in Eighteenth-Century Britain, under advance contract to the University of Chicago Press
The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
Elinor James: Printed Writings (Ashgate Press, 2005)
"Travel," in Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
"Narrative or Network?: Eighteenth-Century Feminist Literary History at the Crossroads," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 29: 1 (2010), 137-58
"Towards a Genealogy of 'Print Culture' and 'Oral Tradition,'" in Clifford Siskin and William Warner, eds., This Is Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 229-46
"'The Art of Printing Was Fatal': Print Commerce and the Idea of Oral Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse," in Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, eds., Ballads and Broadsides 1500-1800 (Ashgate Press, 2010), 35-56
"'On the Behalf of the Printers': A Late Stuart Printer-Author and Her Causes," in Sabrina Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin, eds., Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 125-39
"'The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making': Broadside Ballads in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 47: 2-3 (Summer/Fall 2006), 149-76
“Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 121:1 (Jan. 2006), 87-106. Special Issue: "Book History and the Idea of Literature," ed. Seth Lerer and Leah Price
"Why Fanny Can't Read: Joseph Andrews and the (Ir)relevance of Literacy," in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Blackwell, 2005), 167-90
"Enlightenment Enthusiasms and the Spectacular Failure of the Philadelphian Society," Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.4 (Summer 2002), 515-33
