Beth Fowkes Tobin, Professor of English and Women's Studies, is the author of Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770-1860 (Yale UP, 1993), the award-winning Picturing Imperial Power (Duke UP, 1999) and the award-winning Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), and The Duchess's Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook's Voyages (Yale UP, 2014). She has written extensively on the art, literature, and science of colonialism, and she is co-editor of books on women and material culture: Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies (Ashgate, 2009); Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950 (Ashgate, 2009); Material Women, 1750-1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices (Ashgate, 2009), and Women and the Material Culture of Death (Ashgate, 2013). For her research on the representation of the tropics, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities and a Caird Fellowship from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; for her research on natural history collecting, she received a Scholars Award from the National Science Foundation. Her current research examines the visual culture and material practices of insect collecting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Link to Shell book:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300192230/duchesss-shells
Links to Ashgate books:
Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665380
Material Women, 1750–1950
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665397
Women and Things, 1750–1950
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665502
The Materiality of Color
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409429159
Women and the Material Culture of Death
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409444169
Research
Gender and material culture; cultures of collecting; the history of natural history; the visual culture and material practices Enlightenment science.