Literature and culture of the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, origins of the novel, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, history of drama, transatlantic Puritanism, publishing history, authorship, early modern women writers, Aphra Behn, the Middle East in early modern print culture, African-American women writers, Latino-American writers, and Arabic literature in translation

Professor Bobo is currently teaching an interdisciplinary course, “Milton, the Bible, and the visual arts tradition” in which students apply what they learn about poetry, Scripture, and painting in both a traditional research paper and a creative project. In her scholarship she focuses on the seventeenth-century explosion in print production to analyze the relationships between creative inspiration, spiritual revelation, commercial incentive, and the construction of authorship. Expanding her dissertation, “Milton and Prophetic Authorship in Revolutionary Print Culture,” she examines the poet’s self-representations in context of the ideological conditions of their publication which also allowed for the publication of non-aristocratic women writers such as Mary Cary and Anna Trapnel. Dr. Bobo’s research has resulted in a special session for the MLA Convention: “Politics of the Book Trade and English Revolutionary Literature.” While teaching at the American University in Cairo, she published articles on “Liberal Arts Education in Egypt” and “Women’s History and Human Development.” She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Fellowship which allowed her to explore applications of postcolonial theory to early modern representations of the Ottoman Empire. This research resulted in several papers including, “Reception of the First English Translation of the Koran, 1649,” under discussion for publication in Seventeenth-Century Studies. She served as an editorial assistant for Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Renaissance/Reformation. She has written book reviews, including one of Milton and the Ends of Time for Prose Studies. Her chapter in Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden, “Looking Backward: The State of Innocence and the Politics of Adaptation” will be published by the MLA Press in 2008.