Rate My Professor Nancy Bentley

Nancy Bentley is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Undergraduate Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University, specializing in 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture. Bentley's research interests include law and literature, theory of the novel, African American studies, social theory, cinema and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, modernism and modernity, early American literature, and histories of kinship and sexuality. A distinguished scholar of American literary and cultural studies, she has significantly influenced the field through her interdisciplinary approaches to literature in relation to mass culture, manners, and social formations.

Bentley's major publications include the monographs Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, and Wharton (Cambridge University Press, 1995). She co-authored Volume 3 of the Cambridge History of American Literature (2005) and co-edited the Bedford Cultural Edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (2002). Her essays appear in prestigious journals such as Critical Inquiry, American Literary History, American Literature, ELH, NOVEL, and the Chicago-Kent Law Review. Recent works include “Clannishness: Jewett, Zitkala-Sa, and the Secularization of Kinship” (American Literary History), “The Fourth Dimension: Kinlessness and African American Narrative” (Critical Inquiry), and “Creole Kinship: Privacy, Politics, and the Novel in the New World” (The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature). Her current book project, New World Kinship and American Literature, explores how the novel mediates diverse kinship forms coexisting in the Americas. Bentley received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (2007) and fellowships from Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, and Boston University. She has served as Chair of the English Department, on the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, and the Penn Arts & Sciences Personnel Committee. She holds editorial board positions for American Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Studies in the Novel, and was a Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow for the 2019–2020 Forum on Kinship.