Jenny M. Davidson

Areas of Interest:
Eighteenth-century British literature and culture; cultural and intellectual history, especially history of science; the contemporary novel

Biography: 
A.B., Harvard-Radcliffe (1993); Ph.D., Yale (1999). Jenny Davidson writes about eighteenth-century literature and culture; other interests include British cultural and intellectual history and the contemporary novel in English. She is the author of four novels, Heredity (2003),The Explosionist(2008), Invisible Things (2010), and The Magic Circle (2013). She has published two books about eighteenth-century literature, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge, 2004) and Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (Columbia, 2009). Her latest book, Reading Style: A Life in Sentences, was recently published by Columbia University Press, and she is working on a new book about reading Clarissa. Honors include a Lenfest Distinguished Teaching Award (2005), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005-2006) and the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award (2010).