Emily Gowen
Assistant Professor
Areas of study
- American
Education
Ph.D. Boston University
M.A. Boston University
B.A. Williams College
Research and teaching interests
Early American literature and culture, the novel, the history of the book and print, children's literature, histories of literacy and education
Biography
Emily Gowen is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in the study of early American Literature and culture. Her teaching and research explore the complex relationships among the formation of U.S. American literary culture, the rise of inexpensive print technologies, and the social and cultural transformations that unfolded during the long nineteenth century. She takes a transatlantic approach to the study of the literary marketplace, and charts the way the movement of texts and ideas transformed historical understandings of genre, form, and reading cultures throughout the Anglophone world. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, and her recent work has appeared in American Literature and ELH.
Representative publications
- “Reader Be Assured, This Narrative is No Fiction: Harriet Jacobs and the Print History of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela,” ELH 92.1 (March 2025): 147-173.
- “Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business: Poverty and Race in Horatio Alger’s Newsboy Novels” for special issue of American Literature, “How Literature Understands Poverty” 94.3 (September 2022): 473-496.
- “Steady Sellers, Transatlantic Abridgment, and the Unstable Economics of Robinson Crusoe,” American Literature 93.4 (December 2021): 543-570.