W. R. (Bob) Owens

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Creative Arts, Technology and Science

Bob Owens

I joined the University of Bedfordshire as Professor of English Literature in September 2012. Before then, I had been Professor of English Literature at the Open University, and from 2000 until 2008 I was Head of the Department of English there. Upon my retirement from the University of Bedfordshire in August 2015, I was appointed Visiting Professor.

My main research interests are in English literature of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, in particular the writings of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. I was lead editor of the annual Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture from 1988 until 2021, and from 2001 to 2004 I served as President of the International John Bunyan Society. Together with P.N. Furbank, I was General Editor of The Works of Daniel Defoe, published by Pickering & Chatto (44 volumes, 2000–2009).

I am also interested in aspects of the history of the book, especially textual editing, bibliography and the history of reading. Between 2006 and 2011 I was Principal Investigator on two linked AHRC-funded projects, 'The Reading Experience Database 1800–1945', and 'Developing an International Network in the History of Reading'.

In 2004 I was elected a Fellow of the English Association, and in 2013 I was elected a member of the International Association of University Professors of English.

Qualifications

PhD, 'A Critical Edition of John Bunyan's Posthumously Published Treatise Of Antichrist, and His Ruine (1692)', The Open University, 1984
BA, first class honours, English Language and Literature, University of Ulster, 1977

Teaching expertise

English Literature (especially of the early modern period and up to the end of the eighteenth century).

Research projects (current)

Entries for the ‘Literary Bedfordshire’ project on a number of writers born in Bedfordshire, including John Bunyan (1628‒88), Dorothy Osborne (1627‒95), and William Hale White, also known as ‘Mark Rutherford’ (1813‒1913).
The writings of a controversial Puritan diarist and clergyman, Thomas Larkham (1602‒69).
John Bunyan’s reading and interpretation of the Bible.

External roles (recent and current)

Member of the Executive Committee of the International John Bunyan Society
'Network Partner' on the AHRC-funded project 'Voices and Books, 1500–1800'
Member of Advisory Board for the AHRC-funded project ‘Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present’
Advisory Board member of the Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Daniel Defoe.
Member of the Board of Directors of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)
Member of the Board of Advisors for ABO: A Digital Archive of Early Modern Annotated Books
Member of Editorial Advisory Board for English: The Journal of the English Association
Member of the Editorial Committee of the Friends of Dr Williams's Library Annual Lectures
External examiner for MA in Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Liverpool
Emeritus Professor, The Open University
Visiting Fellow, Northumbria University

Invited papers and lectures (from 2012 onwards)

October 2012, 'Researching the History of Reading: The RED Project', Department of Humanities, Northumbria University
March 2013, 'William Hale White ("Mark Rutherford") and Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century', John Bunyan Museum, Bedford
May 2013, 'Researching Bible Reading in England: Evidence from the Reading Experience Database (RED)', University of Helsinki, Finland
June 2013, 'Jerome McGann's "Social Textual Criticism" and the Editing of Literary Texts from the Long Eighteenth Century', North East Forum for Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies, Newcastle
August 2013, 'Nonconformity in the Novels of William Hale White ("Mark Rutherford"), Princeton University, USA
December 2013, 'Editing Defoe: Reflections on Theory and Practice', Aix-Marseille Université, France
January 2014 (with Alexis Weedon), 'Researching the Publishing History of The Pilgrim's Progress', University of Reading
May 2014, '"But What if the Queen Should Die?": Defoe, the Dissenters, and the Succession', Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies, London
July 2015, ‘Editing Defoe’, at the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Defoe Society, Bath Spa University
July 2016, ‘“There you shall enjoy your friends again”: Bunyan’s Concept of Heaven’, at the Eighth Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society, Aix-Marseille Université, France
July 2016, ‘Studying Reading and Readers using the Reading Experience Database (RED)’, at the International Association of University Professors of English: Triennial Conference, University of London
September 2016, ‘Reading Aloud, Past and Present’, at ‘Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present’, University of London
February 2017, ‘John Bunyan and the Heavenly City’, the 2017 Limborough Lecture, given to the Worshipful Company of Weavers, St Bartholomew the Great, London.
April 2017, ‘Bringing Literature to Life: Reading Aloud’, at a conference on ‘Literature and Life’, University of Exeter.
July 2022, ‘“A Reading and Giving of the Sense”: The Practice of Reading Aloud in Dissenting Culture’, and contribution to Roundtable on ‘Editing Bunyan’, at the Tenth Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
October 2022, ‘Bunyan’s Readers’, at a conference celebrating 350^th anniversary of the founding of Bunyan Meeting, Bedford.

Publications

Books (from 2000 onwards)

(ed.), Dissent, Volume 3, Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000
(ed.), Social Reform, Volume 8, Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000
(ed.), John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2003
(ed.), The True-Born Englishman and Other Poems, Volume 1, Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the Supernatural by Daniel Defoe, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003
(consulting editor), The Selected Works of Delarivier Manley, ed. Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman, 5 vols, Pickering & Chatto, 2005
(ed.), A New Family Instructor, Volume 3, Religious & Didactic Writings by Daniel Defoe, Pickering & Chatto, 2006
(with P. N. Furbank), A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe, Pickering & Chatto, 2006
(ed.), The Complete English Gentleman and Of Royal Education, Volume 10, Religious & Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, Pickering & Chatto, 2007
(ed. with Stuart Sim), Reception, Appropriation, Recollection: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Peter Lang, 2007
(ed.), The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Volume 1, The Novels of Daniel Defoe, Pickering & Chatto, 2008
(ed.), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Volume 2, The Novels of Daniel Defoe, Pickering & Chatto, 2008
(ed. with Delia da Sousa Correa), The Handbook to Literary Research, second rev. edn, Routledge, 2010
(ed.), The Gospels: Authorized King James Version, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2011
(ed. with Shafquat Towheed), The History of Reading, Vol. 1, International Perspectives, c.1500–1990, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
(ed. with Katie Halsey), The History of Reading, Vol. 2, Evidence from the British Isles, c.1750–1950, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
(consulting editor), Christianity Not as Old as the Creation: The Last of Defoe's Performances, ed. G. A. Starr, Pickering & Chatto, 2012
(ed. with Michael Davies), The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, Oxford University Press, 2018.
(ed. with Nicola Darwood and Alexis Weedon), Fiction and ‘The Woman Question’ from 1850 to 1930, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.

Journal editing (from 2012 onwards)

Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture
- Number 16 (2012)
- Number 17 (2013), special issue: ‘William Hale White (“Mark Rutherford”), 1831–1913’
- Number 18 (2014)
- Number 19 (2015), special issue: ‘Religion and Politics in Bunyan’s Writings’
- Number 20 (2016), special issue: ‘Dissenting Hands’
- Number 21 (2017)
- Number 22 (2018), special issue: ‘Circulation, Appropriation, Translation: George Herbert and John Bunyan’
- Number 23 (2019)
- Number 24 (2020), special issue: ‘Honest Labour: Work and Nonconformity’
- Number 25 (2021)

Articles, book chapters, and reviews (from 2012 onwards)

'The English Version of the Polyglot Bible', in Senate House Library, University of London, ed. Christopher Pressler and Karen Attar, Scala Publishers (2012)
'Writing from Prison: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress', in The English Review, 23:2 (2012)
'Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, and the Barbary Pirates', in English, 62 (2013)
'William Hale White, Nonconformist and Novelist', in Bunyan Studies, number 17 (2013)
(jointly with Alexis Weedon), '"My Pilgrim's Book has travel'd Sea and Land": Researching the Publishing History of The Pilgrim's Progress', in The Recorder, number 20 (2014)
Review of Michael Brealey, Bedford's Victorian Pilgrim: William Hale White in Context, in English, 63 (2014)
'A Previously Unknown Photograph of "The Cottage", Groombridge', in The Newsletter of the Mark Rutherford Society, spring (2014).
Review of Jane Darcy, Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816, in The Cowper and Newton Journal, 5 (2015)
Review of Patricia Hurry, Catalogue of the Congregational History Society Library, in Congregational History Society Magazine, 7:5 (2015)
Review of Kirsty Milne, At Vanity Fair: From Bunyan to Thackeray, in Review of English Studies, 67 (2016)
'Religious Writings and the Early Novel', in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. J.A. Downie, Oxford University Press, 2016
'References to Hale White/Mark Rutherford in RED’, in The Newsletter of the Mark Rutherford Society, spring (2017)
‘Ways of Engaging New Readers with The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in The Recorder, number 23 (2017)
‘Studying Readers and Reading using the Reading Experience Database (RED)’, in English Without Boundaries, ed. Jane Roberts and Trudi L. Darby, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017
'Bunyan's Posthumously Published Works', in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, ed. Michael Davies and W. R. Owens, Oxford University Press, 2018
‘“But what if the Queen should die?”: Defoe, the Dissenters, and the Succession’, in Negotiating Toleration: Dissent and the Hanoverian Succession 1714–1760, ed. Benjamin Bankhurst and Nigel Aston, Oxford University Press, 2019
Review of Jordan Alexander Stein, When Novels were Books, in Bunyan Studies, 27 (2023)
‘“There you shall enjoy your friends again”: Bunyan’s Depiction of Heaven’, in The Puritan Literary Tradition, ed. Johanna Harris and Alison Searle, 2024

Conference organisation

July 2008, co-organiser of three-day international conference on ‘Evidence of Reading: Reading the Evidence’, held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London
June 2013, co-organiser of one-day conference ‘William Hale White (“Mark Rutherford”) 100 Years On’, held at Dr Williams’s Library, London
April 2015, co-organiser of one-day conference ‘Representing Dissent in the Long Eighteenth Century’, held at the University of Bedfordshire
July 2016, member of Advisory Committee organising four-day international conference on ‘Voicing Dissent in the Long Reformation’, held at Aix-Marseille University, France
April 2017, co-organiser of one-day conference ‘Prisons and Prison Writing in Early-Modern Britain’, held at Northumbria University
April 2018, co-organiser of one-day conference ‘Remembrance and Re-Appropriation: Shaping Dissenting Identities’, held at Keele University
June 2018, co-organiser of one-day conference ‘Literature and “The Woman Question”, held at the University of Bedfordshire
April 2019, co-organiser of one-day conference ‘Honest Labour: Exploring the Interface between Work and Nonconformity’, held at Loughborough University

Contact details

E: bob.owens@beds.ac.uk