Professor Rachel Bowlby

Email: r.bowlby@ucl.ac.uk
Phone: 020 7679 3138
Internal phone: 33138

Education and Experience

Rachel Bowlby was born in Billingham-on-Tees and grew up there and in Croydon and Newcastle. She was a student at Oxford and then at Yale, where she studied Comparative Literature and wrote a thesis on novels about women and shopping. This became her first book, Just Looking. Before coming to UCL in 2004 she taught at Sussex, Oxford, and York. She has also been a visiting professor at a number of universities including Cornell, Rutgers, Otago (New Zealand), and Paris 3 (the Sorbonne Nouvelle), and she has lectured widely both in this country and elsewhere. In 2008 she gave the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Northcliffe Professor of English at UCL. She has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2011-13.

Research

Since Just Looking, which was about department stores, Rachel Bowlby has written several more books on consumer culture, including Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, about the history of self-service and supermarkets. Shopping with Freud explored some connections between psychoanalysis and consumer psychology, a field of research that began at the same time as psychoanalysis. Two more books have also looked at changing psychological and literary notions of selfhood: Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis and, most recently, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities. Another abiding interest is in realism, both as a specific historical movement in the nineteenth century, and as an ongoing question about how different stories with different assumptions about characters and possibilities come to count as plausible—in the stories we tell in and about ‘real life’, as well as in literature proper. [Life Stories]

Rachel Bowlby’s second book, on Virginia Woolf’s novels, led to a World’s Classics edition of Woolf’s spoof biography Orlando [Life Stories] and to two Penguin volumes of Woolf’s essays. [Editions] She also has a long-standing interest in literary theory, and has translated a number of books by contemporary French philosophers, including Derrida’s Of Hospitality and Paper Machine.

Selected Publications

Books

Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; rpt. 2008 and pbk. 2009). (On Freud's return to the classics in formulating his theories of personal and social change and on what has changed in the likely stories of identity since Freud's own time.)

Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (London: Faber and Faber, 2000 and NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2001). (On changing models of consumers and choice in the history of self-service and supermarkets.)

Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). (A reprint of the 1988 Woolf book, with six 'further' essays.)

Shopping With Freud. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. (On notions of choice in consumer culture, psychoanalysis and feminism.)
Italian translation published as Shopping con Freud (Milan: Lupetti, 1996).

Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1992; rpt. 1998; rpt. forthcoming Taylor & Francis, 2009).

Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. London: Methuen, 1985; rpt. Forthcoming Taylor & Francis, 2009).
Japanese translation published (Tokyo: Arina Shobo, 1990, rpt. 1995).

Edited Books

Editor with Introduction: Virginia Woolf, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993).

Editor with Introduction: Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics 1992).

Editor with Introduction, Virginia Woolf, Longman Critical Readers series (Harlow: Longman, 1992).

Editor with Introduction: Virginia Woolf, A Woman's Essays: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

Articles and Chapters in Books (last 5 years)

‘Two interventions on realism’: ‘Untold Stories in Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘Versions of Realism in George Eliot’s Adam Bede’, Textual Practice 25:3 (2011): 394-436.

‘Introduction’ to new edition of Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 13-32.

‘”Half Art”: Baudelaire’s Le peintre de la vie moderne’, Paragraph 34:1 (March 2011): 1-11.

'Commuting', in Restless Cities, ed. Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (London: Verso, 2010).

‘Derrida’s Dying Oedipus’, on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, forthcoming in Miriam Leonard (ed.), Derrida and Antiquity (Oxford: OUP, 2010).

'"Speech Creatures": New Men in Pamela and Pride and Prejudice', in Theory-Tinged Criticism: Essays in Memory of Malcolm Bowie, ed. Diana Knight and Judith Still, special issue of Paragraph, 32:9 (July 2009): 240-51.

‘After Freud: Sophocles’ Oedipus in the Twenty-First Century’, in Timothy Mathews and Jan Parker (eds), Translation, Tradition, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern (forthcoming Oxford: OUP, 2009).

‘Real Life and its Readers in Mrs Dalloway’, forthcoming in Etudes britanniques contemporaines (2009).

‘Psychoanalysis’, in Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, ed. George Boys-Stones, Barbara Graziosi and Phiroze Vasunia (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp. 802-10.

‘”Where Ignorance is Bliss”: The Folly of Origins in Gray and Hardy’, Comparative Critical Studies 5: 2-3 (2008): 271-88.

‘Derrida One Day’, in Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone (eds), Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 76-80.

‘Foreword’ to Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2007), pp. xi-xviii.

‘Generations’, Textual Practice, 21:1 (March 2007): 1-16.

‘Readable City’, on Wordsworth and Poe, invited contribution to forum on ‘The City’, PMLA 122:1 (January 2007): 306-9.

‘”I had Barbara”: Women’s Ties and Wharton’s “Roman Fever”’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17:3 (Fall 2006): 37-51.

‘Family Realisms: Freud and Greek Tragedy’, 2006 F.W. Bateson Memorial Lecture, Essays in Criticism 56:2 (April 2006): 111-38.

'The Cronus Complex: Psychoanalytic Myths of the Future for Boys and Girls', in Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (eds), Laughing with Medusa (Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 21-44.

Translated Books (since 2000):

Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005).

Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Léon Poliakov, Luc Rosenzweig, Rita Thalmann, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Questions for Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004).

Elisabeth Roudinesco, Why Psychoanalysis? (New York: Columbia UP, 2001).

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).