Dr. Ros Ballaster

Biography

Ros Ballaster is a lecturer and tutorial fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, specializing in 18th Century Studies. She has published widely on fiction, theatre, and women's writing from the eighteenth century. Her recent book, 'Fictions of Presence' (2020), examines the competing ways in which the theatre and the novel of the eighteenth century claimed to provide the audience with an experience of 'presence'. She has edited works by Jane Austen and Delarivier Manley, and contributed to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn. Ballaster served as Principal Investigator for the Digital Humanities project co-funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council, titled the Digital Edgeworth Network, which explores the manuscript archive of the celebrated author Maria Edgeworth. She has supervised 18 doctoral students to successful completion at Oxford and is interested in supervising students whose research focuses on women's writing, fiction, and theatre in the Georgian and Regency periods.

Research Interests