MA, D.Phil; FRSA

1993 D.Phil, Oxford University, Faculty of English

1989-90 University of Pennsylvania, in conjunction with a Harkness Fellowship, Commonwealth Fund of New York

1986, Oxford University, BA Honour School of English Language and Literature, Class 1 (congratulatory)

My research focuses on the British and French Enlightenments, British literature 1660-1820, the novel, Enlightenment debates about women, British literature, empire and colonial emigration from the late seventeenth century to the Romantic period, Malthus, the first Census of 1801 and the "population" issue in British literature and thought of the period, historical writing, the development of the novel in the later eighteenth century, and late eighteenth-century American literature.

I am currently co-editing the 1750-1820 volume of The Oxford History of the Novel. I am also co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Gibbon.  On radio, I am a regular contributor to 'In Our Time' and have also contributed to 'The Westminster Hour', and 'Night Waves'.

My current and previous academic leadership posts include:

• Chair of the University of Warwick Board of Undergraduate Studies (2007-2011), Senior Academic Co-ordinator for Institutional Audit (2007-2009), Deputy Chair of the University of Warwick Arts Faculty (2008-2011), Co-Director of the Warwick Eighteenth-Century Centre;  
• AHRC Peer Review College member;
• Currently external examiner at Leeds University and Cambridge University;
• 2009-10 leader of the Interdisciplinary strand at Warwick as part of the King's/Warwick Project;
• European Advisory Board, Princeton University Press;
• Editorial Board Modern Intellectual History.

Books

Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge University Press, 1997, paperback 2005). [Winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize for 1998]

 Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009, hardback and paperback). Reviewed TLS (5.6.09), The Higher (13.8.09), The London Review of Books (4.11.10)

Selected Articles and Chapters in Books

‘English Enlightenment Histories, 1750-1815, Chapter 25’ in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, volume 3 ed. Daniel Woolf et al (Oxford University Press, 2012).

‘The Return of the Enlightenment’, American History Review 115 (2010) pp. 1426-35

‘Women’s Place, 1690-1750’ in A History of Women’s Writing in Great Britain, volume 1690-1750, ed. Ros Ballaster (Palgrave), pp.19-39.

‘Empire, History and Emigration: From Enlightenment to Liberalism’, in Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories 1750 to the Present, eds. Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (Manchester University Press, 2010), pp.15-35

‘Colonial Emigration, Public Policy and Tory Romanticism, 1783-1830’ in Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperialist Thought, ed. Duncan Kelly, Proceedings of the British Academy, 155, pp.161-79

‘These Nations Newton Made his Own: Poetry, Knowledge and British Imperial Globalisation¡on’ in The Postcolonial Enlightenment, eds. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford University Press, 2009). 281-304.

‘Uneasy Settlement: Wordsworth and Emigration’ in Romanticism’s Debatable Lands, eds. Michael Rossington and Clare Lamont (Palgrave, 2007), 121-35.

‘Poetry and Political Thought: Liberty and Benevolence in the Case of the British Empire, c. 1680-1800’ in British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500-1800, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge, 2006), 168-90.

‘History and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005) 397-415

‘Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England: A Female Perspective on the History of Liberty’ in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, eds. Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott (Palgrave, 2005, paperback 2007), 523-37

‘History as Literature; Literature as Fiction’ in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 363-90

‘The Feminist Critique of Enlightenment’ in The Enlightenment World, eds. Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf and Iain McCalman (Routledge, 2004), 363-90

‘Poetry against Empire: Milton to Shelley’ (British Academy Warton Lecture), Proceedings of the British Academy, 117 (2002), 269-96

‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England" in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (Cassell, 2001), 105-34.

‘Imperial Georgic, 1660-1800’ in The Country and the City Revisited eds. Gerald Maclean and Donna Landry ( Cambridge University Press, 1998), 160-179.

‘Still at Home: Cowper’s New Domestic Empires’ in Early Romanticism: Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (Macmillan, 1998), 134-50.

‘Protestantism and the Poetry of Empire, 1660-1800’ in Culture and Politics in Britain, 1660-1800, ed. Jeremy Black (Manchester University Press, 1997), 146-62.

‘Gibbon’s Prospects: Rhetoric and Empire at the end of The Decline and Fall’ in Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, eds. David Womersley, John Pocock and John Burrow (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 235-52.

‘William Robertson’s Place in the Development of Narrative History’, William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 74-91.

‘The Delayed Americanisation of American History’, Early American Literature, 29 (1994), 1-18. [Runner-up for the 1994 Richard Beale Davis Prize].

‘Between Enlightenment and Stadial History: William Robertson on the History of Europe’, The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 16 (1993), 53-63.

‘Johnson’s View of the Scottish Enlightenment in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland’, The Age of Johnson, IV, ed. P.J. Korshin (New York, 1991), 59-82.

Selected Plenary Lectures and Other Papers

2011 Plenary Lecture, Hume Tercentenary Conference, Edinburgh University 

2011 Annual Wordsworth Lecture, Lancaster University

2011 “Feminist Genealogies Colloquium”, Boston Unversity

2011 “The Global Jane Austen”, visiting speaker paper, Tsinghua University

2011 Cheltenham Literature Festival “Utopias” (with Julian Baggini and John Carey)

2010: Tucker-Cruse Lecture, Bristol University, ‘Jane Austen’s Surplus People’

2009: "The 1803 edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population", Malthus Reading group, King’s College, London

2009: Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, Jane Austen Society Annual Conference, "Hospitality in the Home in Jane Austen’s Novels"

2009: "In Conversation with.." public event, Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies

2009: ‘The British Novel on the Colonial Frontier, 1750-1820’, plenary lecture, Narrative Dominions, Institute of English Studies

2009: Central European University, Budapest: international summer school lectures on ‘Space, Science and Claims to European Domination’

2009: ‘Women, Rousseau and Civic Virtue in Britain’, colloquium on ‘Civic Virtue and Modernity: Debates on Rousseau’, German Historical Institute/ UCL

2008: Invited speaker Neale Colloquium on ‘Race, Nation and empire: the Writing of Modern British Histories’, University College, London

2008: ‘Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy’, Clark Library/Warwick colloquium

 2008: Keynote Lecture, ‘Wordsworth and Scotland’ for the 37^th Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere

2006: British Museum, Public Lecture, ‘What did the Enlightenment do for Women?’

2006: Invited speaker, British Academy colloquium on ‘Lineages of Empire’, published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, 155

2005: Plenary Lecture, ‘Wordsworth and Emigration’, The British Association of Romantic Studies’ biennial conference

2005: Invited speaker, Folger Institute, The Folger Library, Washington DC (‘British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory’)

2003: Plenary Lecture, ‘The History Women’, International Conference on Women’s Writing 1660-1830 to mark the opening of Chawton House Library (a former residence of Jane Austen)

2003: Invited speaker ‘Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Postcolonial Theories’ colloquium, the Clark Library UCLA.

2001: Warton Lecture, The British Academy, ‘Poetry against Empire’

1999: "The Vanity of Empire", plenary lecture at the annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, St John’s College, Oxford

Also, since 1999, invited guest lectures and papers at the Universities of Tsinghua, CEU Budapest, UCL, Sussex, Liverpool, Oxford, Regensburg, Cambridge, Frankfurt, Nantes, Swansea, Queen Mary and Westfield, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff, York, Lund and the Institute of Historical Research, London.