Jody Gentian Bower, PhD, is a cultural mythologist and writer. She is the author of Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story and The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties become Warrior Goddesses. She is currently at work on an historical/magical realism romance based on a family story. She is also a part-time book editor for New Harbinger Publications.

After working as a scientific and technical writer and editor for over 30 years, she earned her doctorate in Mythological Studies with a Depth Psychology Emphasis in 2012. Her dissertation on “Recurrent Motifs in Women’s Narratives” won “Honorary Mention: Dissertation of Excellence” in the 2014 Kore Award competition of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. Dr. Bower now teaches classes and lectures on the wisdom of women’s stories, archetypal psychology, and the role of myths in modern culture–particularly in television and the movies.

“It’s all about story,” Dr. Bower says. “Every human endeavor involves telling some kind of story. Scientific writing tells the story of discoveries. History consists of stories about who we think we were in the past and how we got to where we are now. Mythology tells us stories about why the world is the way it is. Psychology delves into the stories we tell ourselves about who we really are. Humans are storytellers. Once you grasp that you’re telling a story and find the plot of that story, you can write about anything.

“The central theme of my work is looking at how popular culture has been re-imagining traditional stories in new ways. My first book discusses how novelists have been telling a very different story about heroines, one that bears almost no resemblance to Joseph Campbell’s Hero Quest story, for centuries now. In my second book, I look at how movies have re-imagined cultural ideas of the Princess over time. In my blog, I often write about how popular culture reflects our ideas about heroism and masculinity, as well as how formerly disenfranchised groups are starting to take control of the narrative, giving us stories about us instead of them. I’m excited about the visions of the future we can see in popular culture.”

In addition to blogging about movies and television on this website. she posts essays on Substack.

Every word in her books, on this site, and on any other site came out of her own brain; she never uses and never will use AI.

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