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 Josephine McDonagh FBA
Josephine McDonagh is the author of several monographs and editor of volumes of essays on a range of interdisciplinary topics, with a focus on nineteenth-century British literature, particularly Britain’s global and imperial relations. Most recently she has interrogated the role of literature in settler colonisation, migration and emigration.
Professor Antoine Compagnon FBA
French Renaissance prose; 19th and 20th-century French literature and culture; history of criticism; theory of literature
Professor Patrick Wright FBA
'Heritage' and the power of tradition in British culture since 1890; the cultural dimensions of international relations since 1945; place and belonging in relation to globalisation
