Paula McDowell

Media history and theory; the Marshall McLuhan archives (20th c.); format theory and changing textual ecologies (oral, manuscript, print, digital); eighteenth-century British literature and social and cultural history; conceptual history

John Ben Snow Foundation Prize for The Invention of the Oral; Choice Outstanding Academic Title Awards for The Invention of the Oral and The Women of Grub Street; National Humanities Center Fellowship; American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship; American Philosophical Society Research Grant; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Newberry Library; American Bibliographical Society Research Fellowship; United Kingdom Bibliographical Society Research Grant

Paula McDowell’s interests include media history and theory; eighteenth-century British literature and social and cultural history; the Marshall McLuhan archives (20th c.); format theory and changing textual ecologies (oral, manuscript, print, digital); and conceptual history.  To date an eighteenth-century specialist, she is now writing two archivally-based books on literature professor and founder of media studies Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980): “Marshall McLuhan: A Literary Biography” and “Base Camp: Five Journeys Through the McLuhan Archives.” She has recently published “Elsie McLuhan’s Vocal Science,” PMLA 135 (2020) (on Marshall’s mother, the elocutionist Elsie Naomi Hall McLuhan), and she is editing and contributing to a special issue of Textual Practice on “Reading McLuhan Reading.” 

McDowell’s most recent book, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (U of Chicago P, 2017), won the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize, awarded annually by the North American Conference on British Studies. With the support of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has published The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Clarendon Press, 1998), Elinor James: Printed Writings (Ashgate Publishing, 2005), and articles on subjects ranging from the epistemology of ephemera to models of the Enlightenment.