Professor Emerita Beth Fowkes Tobin, Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies, is the author of Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770-1860 (Yale UP, 1993), the award-winning Picturing Imperial Power (Duke UP, 1999) and the award-winning Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). She has written extensively on the art, literature, and science of colonialism, and she is co-editor of books on women and material culture: Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies (Ashgate, 2009); Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950 (Ashgate, 2009); Material Women, 1750-1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices (Ashgate, 2009), and Women and the Material Culture of Death (Ashgate, 2013). For her research on the representation of the tropics, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities and a Caird Fellowship from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Her most recent book, The Duchess's Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook's Voyages (Yale Press, 2014), is on eighteenth-century natural history and the culture of collecting, focusing on the Duchess of Portland's shell collection, a project for which she received a Scholars Award from the National Science Foundation. Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665380 Material Women, 1750–1950 http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665397 Women and Things, 1750–1950 http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665502 The Materiality of Color http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409429159 Women and the Material Culture of Death http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409444169
