Manushag Powell

Manushag N. Powell joined the faculty of Purdue University in 2007. She was appointed Secretary of Faculties in the summer of 2020, following the service of Joseph W. Camp, Jr. (2003-2020). She is the secretary, parliamentarian, and advisor to the Faculty Senate. Her responsibilities include acting as a member and secretary to the Senate Steering Committee and the Intercampus Faculty Council, as a member of the Senate Advisory Committee, and as the executive secretary for the Senate Nominating Committee.

A professor of English and Comparative Literature, Dr. Powell earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She came to Purdue as an Assistant Professor in 2007, was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, and promoted to Full Professor in 2019. She served as the Director of Graduate Studies in English from 2016-2020, member of the Graduate Council and Chair of Graduate Area Committee D from 2017-2020, Faculty Chair of the CLA Senate 2018-19, and Secretary and Parliamentarian of the CLA Senate 2019-20. Powell teaches academic publishing for English graduate students, undergraduate and graduate courses in various aspects of British literature and culture, and classes on dragons and piracy in literature and history (but so far not in the same class).

Powell currently serves as the Executive Director of the Defoe Society and Secretary-Treasurer of the International Eliza Haywood Society. As a researcher she is a cultural historian of literary form. Her books include Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (Bucknell 2012), British Pirates in Print and Performance (with Frederick Burwick: Palgrave 2015), and Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820 (ed. with Jennie Batchelor: Edinburgh 2018). She is the editor of the Broadview Press edition of Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton (2019).