Mollie Bowman

Professional Bio

Mollie Bowman is a first-year PhD student in English at Penn State University. With a deep interest in early modern poetics, she studies many British poets and writers with an emphasis on the works of John Milton.

Her current research interests revolve around the reception of the works of Milton from the late seventeenth century to the present day, primarily focusing on the lingering cultural impact of the icon of Milton. Her current work focuses on the way that online fandom spaces negotiate with and respond to Miltonic resonances in their fan objects. Within the early modern period more generally, she focuses on Christian identity, imitation and invention, classical and authorial reception, and gender and sexuality.

She recently presented on the online appropriation of Paradise Lost by Chainsaw Man fans in response to Miltonic imagery in the manga at the 2024 Conference on John Milton. This paper was selected for expansion as a chapter in an edited collection publishing selected works from the conference.  At the 13th International Milton Symposium, she presented on the representation and deconstruction of the Miltonic idol in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She has presented elsewhere on topics like queer coding in Stephen King’s IT and online fatigue in virtual Writing Labs, a paper that has since been published in WLN. She is an award-winning writing lab consultant who was recognized as one of the top 19 student employees in the nation by the NSEA in 2022.