Prof Bob Owens

Professional biography

Bob Owens studied English Literature at the University of Ulster and began his postgraduate studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury. In 1978 he was appointed to a research post at The Open University, where he received his PhD in 1984. He became Staff Tutor and Lecturer in Literature at The Open University in London in 1986, and Professor of English Literature in 2003. From 2000 until 2008 he was Head of the Department of English. He retired in March 2011. He is currently a Visiting Professor at The University of Bedforshire.

Research interests

His research interests are in English literature of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, in particular the writings of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe, and in Book History, especially textual editing and the history of reading. He was co-founder and from 2000 until 2011 Director of the Book History and Bibliography Research Group, established to promote research into the production, distribution and readership of books. From 2004 to 2007 he was Co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Colonial and Post-Colonial History of the Book’; from 2006 to 2009 he was Principal Investigator and Director of the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Reading Experience Database 1800–1945’; and from 2010 to 2011 he was Principal Investigator and Director of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Developing an International Digital Network in the History of Reading: collaboration between the UK Reading Experience Database and invited partners’. (For the two latter projects, see www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK.)

Professor Owens’s publications in these fields include editions of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Penguin Classics, 1987); two volumes of The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan (Clarendon Press, 1994); The Pilgrim’s Progress (Oxford World’s Classics, 2003); and two volumes of essays, John Bunyan and his England, 1628–88 (Hambledon Press, 1990, with Anne Laurence and Stuart Sim) and Reception, Appropriation, Recollection: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Peter Lang, 2007, with Stuart Sim). 

More recently, together with Michael Davies, he co-edited The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is a founder editor of the scholarly journal Bunyan Studies, and from 2001 to 2004 served as President of The International John Bunyan Society.Much of his work on Daniel Defoe has been carried out in collaboration with P. N. Furbank. They are co-authors of The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (Yale University Press, 1988); Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (Hambledon Press, 1994); A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (Pickering & Chatto, 1998); and A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (Pickering & Chatto, 2006); and they are also co-editors of Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (Yale University Press, 1991). From 2000 to 2009 they were joint General Editors of The Works of Daniel Defoe, published in 44 volumes by Pickering & Chatto. Professor Owens edited the volumes on Dissent (2000), Social Reform (2000), The True-Born Englishman and Other Poems (2003), A New Family Instructor (2006), The Complete English Gentleman (2007), The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (2008), and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (2008).

His more recent publications include an edition of the 1611 Authorized Version text of The Gospels for Oxford World’s Classics (2011); two volumes of essays in the Palgrave Macmillan series The History of Reading: Vol. 1, International Perspectives, c.1550–1945 (2011, edited with Shafquat Towheed) and Vol. 2, Evidence from the British Isles, c.1800–1945 (2011, edited with Katie Halsey); and Fiction and ‘The Woman Question’ from 1850 to 1930 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), edited with Nicola Darwood and Alexis Weedon.

In addition to these books and editions, Professor Owens has contributed some fifty or so articles and chapters to scholarly journals and edited collections.