Professor, Department
of English, College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences
Education
PhD, University of Chicago
Bio
Beth Tobin is the author of three books: Colonizing Nature: The
Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (U of
Pennsylvania P, 2005), winner of the “Eighth Annual Susanne M.
Glasscock Book Prize” for best book of interdisciplinary
humanities scholarship; Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial
Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Duke UP,
1999), winner of the “Best Book on British Art before
1800” presented by the Historians of British Art; and
Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal
Landlords in British Fiction, 1770-1860 (Yale UP, 1993). She is
the editor of the Oxford Classics' Eliza Haywood novel, Miss Betsy
Thoughtless (1997), and History, Gender and Literature, a
collection of essays (U of Georgia Press, 1994). She is
working on a book on natural history collecting in the eighteenth
century, a project for which she recently received a scholar's award
from the National Science Foundation. She also received a senior
fellowship from NEH in 2000 to work on what became her book
Colonizing Nature. She has co-edited a series of books
for Ashgate on gender and material culture. Women and
Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies (Ashgate, 2009
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665502);
Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950
(Ashgate, 2009 http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665380 );
and Material Women, 1750-1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting
Practices (Ashgate, 2009 http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665397 ).