Professor Rachel Bowlby FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2007
- Subjects
- Literature
Summary
Rachel Bowlby's work is focused on two main areas: literary realism, and the history and theory of consumer culture. These interests have been linked since her first book, Just Looking (1985), on novels about department stores. Other books on consumer culture include Shopping with Freud (1993), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000), on supermarkets, and Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future (2022). She has written on everyday life and its representations in Everyday Stories (2016) and on reproductive technologies and changing forms of parenthood in A Child of One's Own (2013). All her work is informed by psychoanalytic and deconstructive thinking, especially Feminist Destinations (1997) on Virginia Woolf, and Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (2007). Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism (2018) and Unexpected Items (2024) are recent collections of essays. Rachel Bowlby has also translated several works of contemporary French philosophy, including two books by Jacques Derrida. She has held various visiting positions or fellowships at universities including Cornell, Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Otago (New Zealand) (2006). In 2024 she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. Her most recent book is Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025).
Current post
University College London Professor of Comparative Literature
2014 -
Past appointments
Princeton University Professor of Comparative Literature
2013 - 2016
University College London Lord Northcliffe Professor of English
2004 - 2014
University of York Professor of English
1999 - 2004
University of Oxford Fellow and Professor of English
1997 - 1999
University of Sussex English: Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader
1984 - 1994
Publications
Other Fellows of the British Academy
Professor Hilary Owen FBA
The literatures, cultures and cinema of Portugal and Lusophone Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries; feminist theory and gender studies; women's writing and filmmaking; postcolonial theory
Professor Esther Leslie FBA
Aesthetics in combination with politics; Marxism and critical theory, especially the work of Walter Benjamin and TW Adorno; the poetics of science and technology; animation; digital culture and the sensorium
Professor Paul Julian Smith FBA
Spanish and Latin American cinema, television, and visual culture; literature in Spanish from the Renaissance to the present
