Jennifer Scanlon, Bowdoin’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities in Gender and Women’s Studies, and the associate dean for faculty, is one of the leading experts on the life and career of longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown.

The New York Times Magazine tapped Scanlon’s insight, and that of Susan Faludi, Bowdoin’s Tallman Scholar in Gender and Women’s Studies, for the piece, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,'” a look at the genesis of one of Brown’s books.

Scanlon’s biography, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (Oxford University Press), released in 2009, a year before Brown’s death, has received rave reviews.