Mary Poovey papers (Ms.2017.001)

Biographical/Historical note

Mary Poovey is Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. She received her BA in English from Oberlin College in 1972 and her MA and PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 1973 and 1976 respectively. Her primary scholarly work focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, history, and culture, although she has also published on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, the history of literary criticism, feminist theory, and economic history. Her two most recent books, A History of the Modern Fact and Genres of the Credit Economy, examine the emergence of the modern disciplines. In them, she argues that literary study acquired the rudiments of its modern form through a process of generic differentiation that distinguished between modes of writing about value. Her current work focuses on financial crises, both past and present. Her other books include The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984), Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1989), and Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (1995). (Biography from http://english.fas.nyu.edu/object/marypoovey.html)