Rate My Professor Manushag Powell

Manushag N. Powell serves as Chair and Professor of English and comparative literature in the Department of English at Arizona State University, a position she assumed in July 2024. Prior to joining ASU, Powell held a series of leadership roles at Purdue University, where she had been a faculty member in the Department of English since 2007. She was promoted to full professor in 2019, served as associate head of English, secretary of faculties, and Director of Graduate Studies. Powell earned her B.A. in English from Yale University, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her teaching interests encompass British literature and culture of the long 18th century, genre studies, novels and prose forms, British drama, gothic literature, narratives of piracy, and dragons.

Powell's scholarship centers on 18th-century British literature and culture, particularly historical periodicals, the rise of professional authorship, British women writers, gender and authorship, performance in literature, and popular genres such as criminal conversation, bigamy, and piracy. Key publications include her monograph Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (Bucknell University Press, 2012), which explores authorship in periodicals like The Female Spectator and The Covent-Garden Journal; British Pirates in Print and Performance, co-authored with Frederick Burwick (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century, co-edited with Jennie Batchelor (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); and her critical edition of Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (Broadview Press, 2019). She has published articles such as “Thieving Hooks, and the Stories We Tell about Pirates” in Digital Defoe. Powell’s honors include Purdue University Faculty Scholar recognition, the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award (2015–16), and the Teaching for Tomorrow Fellowship. As a public scholar and genre theorist, she delivers lectures and teaches courses on the real history of pirates, debunking myths like hook hands and peg legs originating from 19th- and 20th-century literature rather than historical records, and emphasizing piracy’s global scope and socioeconomic realities. At ASU, she advances the department’s diverse programs while fostering faculty and student success.