Manushag N. Powell is a Professor of English at Purdue University, where she has been a University Faculty Scholar and has served as Director of Graduate Studies in English and Secretary of Faculties. She received a BA in English from Yale University and an MA and a PhD in English, specializing in 18th-century British literature and culture, from the University of California, Los Angeles. She also taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Professor Powell is an 18th centuryist and a cultural historian of literary form. She serves as the director of the Defoe Society, secretary-treasurer of the International Eliza Haywood Society, and treasurer of the Women’s Caucus at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is also a member of the Johnsonian Society. She is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Graduate Teacher Award, College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher Award, and Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Professor Powell’s books include Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals, British Pirates in Print and Performance (with Frederick Burwick), and Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s (coedited with Jennie Batchelor). She is also the editor of the Broadview Press edition of Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton.