| 1 | Name: | Dr. Rachel Bowlby | |
| Institution: | University College, London | ||
| Year Elected: | 2024 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1957 | ||
Rachel Bowlby is Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London, Emeritus since 2023. She was previously (2004-14) Lord Northcliffe Professor of English, also at UCL, and held posts before that at the universities of York, Oxford and Sussex. Beginning with a Yale PhD dissertation (in Comparative Literature) on novels about department stores, a principal focus of her research has been the history of consumer culture. Books on this subject include Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreisuer, Gissing and Zola (1985), Shopping with Freud (1993), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000) (on the history of supermarkets), and Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future (2022). Other work has focused on connections between feminism, literary theory and psychoanalysis: Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992); Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (2007). She has also written about everyday life, including the history of parenthood and reproductive technologies: A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories (2013); Everyday Stories (2016). Two authors have been the subject of monographs. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997) extended a previous book on Woolf, while Zola: Writing Modern Life (2025) returns to one of the three authorial subjects of Bowlby’s first book, Just Looking. Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism (2018) brought together a selection of essays in the various fields of her interest; it is joined by another collection of essays, Unexpected Items: Shopping, Parenthood, Changing Feminist Stories (2024); this book is part of Edinburgh University Press’s Feminist Library series. Rachel Bowlby has also translated a number of works of contemporary French philosophy, including two books by Jacques Derrida. She has held visiting positions or fellowships at Cornell University (1990-91) and at the universities of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) (2007) and Otago (New Zealand) (2006), and delivered the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University (2008). She has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2007. | |||