A native of Baltimore, Erin Mackie majored in Classics at The Johns Hopkins University and then went on to get a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. She specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature and culture and has taught both in the United States and abroad in Tokyo and in New Zealand. Her three books explore her interest in literature and cultural history. The first, Market a la Mode examines how the early eighteenth-century magazines The Tatler and The Spectator use fashion as an avenue of socio-cultural management. Her selected edition of these periodicals, The Commerce of Everyday Life, is organized around the themes of commerce, fashion, gender, and taste that define life in eighteenth-century London. Her recent study of masculinity, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates, looks at those infamous criminal types in relation to the iconic English gentleman. She teaches courses on fiction and the novel.

Professor Mackie has supervised MA and Ph.D. theses in historical fields from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries and in contemporary cultural studies.