Thomas F. Bonnell is a Professor of English at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He holds a B.A. from Saint Olaf College, as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His primary area of scholarly research is eighteenth-century British literature, with a particular focus on the history of the book trade and canon formation. He is the author of the major study, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry, 1765–1810 (2008). In this work, he examines how publishers, influenced by market forces and landmark copyright law, created the first mass-market, multi-volume collections of English poetry, which were instrumental in shaping the modern literary canon.
Bonnell served as the editor for two volumes of the research edition of James Boswell's Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript: Volume 3, covering the years 1776–1780 (2012), and the fourth and final volume, covering 1780–1784 (2020).