Paula McDowell

About:

Paula McDowell specializes in 18th-century British literature and print culture and the History of the Book. With the support of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center, she has published The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730 (Oxford); Elinor James: Printed Writings (Ashgate); and articles on models of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century novel, the epistemology of ephemera, and other topics. She is currently completing Fugitive Voices: Print Commerce and the Idea of Oral Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Britain, a study of the literate re-evaluation of popular orality and ideas of oral tradition between Swift and Wordsworth and the emergence of the modern intellectual category of "oral culture." Her next book will be a study of John "Orator" Henley and the origins of public debating societies and commercialized oratory in Britain.