Nancy Bentley received her Ph.D. from Harvard with a specialization in American literature and culture. She also teaches and publishes in the areas of law and literature, African-American literature, and modern social theory.

Much of Bentley’s scholarship explores the role of the imagination as an active component of the social. Her first book, The Ethnography of Manners (1995), examines fiction and ethnography as related forms for analyzing social life. In 2005 her book High Literary Forms and Mass Culture was published in Volume 3 or the Cambridge History of American Literature. She is currently completing a study entitled Kinship and Wayward Affiliation in the American Novel, 1850-1913. This book explores the way writers imagined an “Americanization” of kinship, the view that life in the New World (the American continent and the West Indies) posed the danger––or the opportunity––of radically remaking the human ties of bloodlines, sex, and family feeling.

Her work has also appeared in such journals as American Literary History, ELH, American Literature, and the Chicago-Kent Law Review. She has been a contributor to the edited collections Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (Duke, 1995) and The Futures of American Studies (Duke, 2002). She is currently on the editorial boards of the University of Pennsylvania Press and Nineteenth-Century Literature, and has been elected to the MLA Division committee on Anthropological Approaches to Literature. She has received fellowships from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Dartmouth College, and Boston University.