Karen O'Brien is Head of Humanities and Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge,1997), Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2009) and, as co-editor with Peter Garside, The Oxford History of the Novel: British and British Fiction: 1750–1820 (2015).