Toni Bowers (Professor) received her Ph.D. from Stanford, specializing in British literature and culture from Charles II’s restoration in 1660 to the French Revolution. Professor Bowers’ research and writing focus particularly on how representations of intimate relations shaped and reinforced distributions of power during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. She publishes and teaches on writing by and about women, ideologically driven and partisan political writing (which, she maintains, are not the same thing), the discursive construction of "Great Britain," and prose fiction in England and Scotland.

In addition to her many essays in scholarly journals and collections, she is the author of Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760, (Oxford University Press), and The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1660-1760 (Cambridge University Press). With John Richetti (Emeritus), she has co-edited an abridgement of Richardson's Clarissa (Broadview Press). She is currently writing a book about the language used between 1705 and 1707 to debate the Union of England and Scotland, and with Professor Tita Chico of the University of Maryland she is co-editing a volume of scholarly essays titled Seduction and Sentiment in the Atlantic World (Palgrave: 2012).  For more of Dr. Bowers's publications, see here.

Dr. Bowers regularly presents her scholarship across the United States and has lectured by invitation in Canada, England, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland. In addition to her undergraduate teaching, she leads graduate seminars, directs and advises doctoral dissertations, supervises both undergraduate and graduate-level independent studies, and serves on various committees for the English Department, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the University. Dr. Bowers co-founded Penn’s Atlantic Studies Seminar in 2001, was Visiting Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh 1999-2000, and was for many years Faculty-in-Residence at Kings Court-English House College House, where she founded the undergraduate humanities society Perspectives in Humanities and inaugurated the Penn Authors' Forum.

Instructions for Students Seeking Letters of Recommendation

English 341 Lecture, April 2010