Prof Ros Ballaster

Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Oxford and professorial fellow in English at Mansfield College. She teaches courses on the fiction of fantasy in the long eighteenth century, Georgian theatre, and women’s writing.  Two monographs, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740 (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Oxford University Press, 2005), investigated the importance of fantasy in the shaping of the eighteenth-century novel. Her recent research focuses on the interaction of the theatre and the novel in Enlightenment culture, with respect in particular to the figuration of embodiment.  Alongside her academic post, she spent 2014-2015 working as a Knowledge Exchange fellow with the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton, UK, adding literary value to in-house adaptations.