Toni Bowers (Professor; Ph.D. Stanford University).

I specialize in 4 related subject areas: English-language writing from the 17th and 18th centuries, gender studies, the history of pantomime, and silent film.

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on writing from the 17th and 18th centuries, lyric poetry, epistolary fiction, and early 20th-century silent film.  I have taught at Penn for more than thirty years, and during that time have also been invited to serve as a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh and at Kings College London. In 2018, I served as MacLain Distinguished Professor at Colorado College. In 2022, Penn honored me with the Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching. 

I have published on the imaginative construction of motherhood in early-modern Britain, on the ideological struggles built into scenes of seduction/rape in literature and visual art, and on the relationship between force-based systems (e.g., chattel slavery, patriarchy)  and sentimentalism in early-modern writing from the Atlantic world. I publish original scholarly essays in peer-reviewed journals, student-friendly editons of  early narratives, and edited collections of thematically related essays by other scholars. I participate in peer-review as a reviewer as well as an author. I have lectured by invitation across the United States and in Canada, England, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland.

In addition to dozens of essays and reviews, I've published two original monographs:  Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760, (Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1660-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). With Professor John Richetti (Penn), I co-edited a 1-volume abridgement, for students, of Samuel Richardson's 1747-48 8-volume masterpiece Clarissa (Broadview Press, 2010). Our edition is now in frequent use in undergraduate and graduate classrooms worldwide. With Professor Tita Chico (Maryland), I edited a volume of scholarly essays titled Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century  (Palgrave, 2012).

Currently, I am co-editing (with Professor Albert Rivero of Marquette University) the first teaching edition of Richardson's entire 4-volume novel Pamela (1740-41), one of the most influential works of the eighteenth century. I am also editing for publication two first-person memoirs about the artistic processes of the pantomimist filmmaker Charles Chaplin. I have been granted permission by the respective literary estates to edit and publish these works, both of which were written by close Chaplin contemporaries but have never before been published. With assistance from Penn graduate student Peter Diamond and Penn undergraduate Aubrey Shi,  I am completing the digitalization of both memoirs now, and expect to complete the editing and annotations in 2024. 

 I direct and advise doctoral dissertations at Penn and at other institutions around the world. I supervise independent studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and serve on committees for Penn's English Department, the School of Arts and Sciences, the University as a whole, and several national and international scholary societies. I have been the recipient of a number of  fellowships and prizes, for instance from the NEH, the British Academy, the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library (two long-term awards), the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Harry Ransom Center, among other awards.

I have served as faculty mentor to the Undergraduate Advisory Board.  I co-founded the Atlantic Studies Seminar at Penn's McNeil Center for Early American Studies and I founded the campus-wide undergraduate club Perspectives in Humanities. The latter student group, with my help, inaugurated the ongoing Penn Authors' Forum, where Penn faculty informally share their research with undergraduates. I served for many years as Faculty-in-Residence at Kings Court-English College House and on the Steering Committee and as a Core Faculty Member for Penn's Gender Studies program (GSWS), as well as on the Advisory Board to the McNeil Center. I serve as editorial consultant for a number of academic journals and publishing houses. I've been both Delegate and member of the Executive Committee of the Delegates for the ACLS (American Council for Learned Societies), and have served the Modern Language Association as a member, then Chair, of the Executive Committee for Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Studies. I've also been a Delegate for the MLA and have served on its Executive Committee for Scottish Literature.