Bio

Emily Gowen is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. Her book-in-progress was awarded the 2023 SHEAR dissertation prize and will be published by Penn Press. Prior to beginning at Harvard, she was the 2022-23 John B. Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. She has held research fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the BU Center for the Humanities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Early American Literature, and several online outlets. Her work explores the intersections of the rise of the novel, the history of print, and the problem of social inequality in the nineteenth-century United States.

Research Interests

• Early American Literature
• The History of the Novel
• Education
• History of the Book/Print Culture