B.A.            Yale University

M. A.          University of Pennsylvania

Ph.D.         University of Pennsylvania

Lynn Festa is an Associate Professor of English. She is author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and co-editor of the forthcoming The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Post-Colonial Theory (Oxford University Press, 2008). Her articles have appeared in the journals Eighteenth-Century Life, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, as well as the anthology The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton University Press, 2001).

She is currently working on two projects: The Personality of Things in Eighteenth-Century Britain, which addresses how eighteenth-century representations of circulating goods and bodies unsettle the boundaries between subjects and objects, persons and things in eighteenth-century Britain; and The Properties of Empire: Nation, Race, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, which offers a comparative literary and cultural history of the elaboration of Enlightenment categories of human classification.