Scott R. MacKenzie works on literature of the long eighteenth century, particularly prose fiction, aesthetics, and political debate on economic matters. His book, Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home (U of Virginia Press, 2013), won the Walker Cowen Prize for a study on an eighteenth-century topic. It argues that fiction and discourse about poverty in Britain in the later eighteenth century collaborate to invent modern private domesticity and the first occupants of home -- at least conceptually -- are the poor rather than the middle- classes, who rapidly appropriate home for themselves. He has published articles on Economic themes in fiction and drama in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ELH, and Eighteenth-Century Studies as well as articles in PMLA, Studies in Romanticism, and European Romantic Review, and most recently the aesthetics of lineation in Criticism. His current research focuses on the emergence of the economic and ecological "laws" of scarcity during the eighteenth century.