Barbara M. Benedict, who was raised in Mauritius, London, the Seychelles, and Berkeley, earned her B.A. cum laude in British History and Literature from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Hired at Trinity College in 1984, she acted as Departmental Chair for five years, and now holds an endowed College Chair as the Charles A. Dana Professor of English. For Professor Benedict, literature is a variegated, rich, complex triumph of imagination and artistry, asking for both close attention and wide context. Teaching, similarly, is an art that commands the teacher to give personal attention to each student’s insights, while also painting a vivid picture of literary history. Her pedagogy thus blends class discussions of texts in detail with lectures and varied writing assignments that include free-ranging research into history and culture. For Professor Benedict, literature best unfolds its beauty and meaning for students when understood as the achievement of a cultural instant that reaches out to all human experience.

Publications:

• Benedict, Barbara. ed. Eighteenth-Century English Erotica, 1700-1800, vol. 4, Wilkes and the Late Eighteenth-Century (Pickering and Chatto, 2002). General Editors: Alex Pettit and Pat Spedding.
• Benedict, Barbara. Editor, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, with co-editor Deidre Le Faye Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006. General Editor: Janet Todd.
• Benedict, Barbara. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Paperback edition, 2002.
• Benedict, Barbara. Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literary Anthologies. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996.
• Benedict, Barbara. Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800. New York: AMS Press Inc., 1994.

• “The Satire of Learning: Voyage III.” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ ed. Nicholas Saeger (Cambridge University Press, 2023): 150-63.
• “Toxic Love: Gender and Genre in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction v.35, no.2 (April 2023): 235-60.
• ‘Playing with her bracelets and Rings’: Jewelry, Character and Objectification in Jane Austen’s        Novels.” Persuasions no. 44 (Spring 2023): 202-211.
• “Memories and Memorials: Factual Genres in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” Defoe in Context, eds. Albert J. Rivero and George Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2021): 70-77.
• “So Much to Read! So Little Time! Reading the Literary Miscellany in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Miscellanies Lesen/Miscellaneous Reading (Hannover: Wehrhahn, May/June 2021: 56-73.  
• “Solitude and Collecting: Robinson’s Curiosities.” Proceedings of the Tricentenary of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’Digital Defoe & His Contemporaries, 12, no. 1 (fall, 2019): ISSN 1948-1802.
• Benedict, Barbara. "Encounters with the Object: Advertisements, Time, and Literary Discourse in the Early Eighteenth-Century Thing-Poem." Eighteenth-Century Studies 4.2 (Winter, 2006): 193-207.
• Benedict, Barbara. "Displaying Difference: Curious Count Boruwlaski and Staging Class Identity." ECL (2006): 30.3 (August, 2006): 82-110.
• Benedict, Barbara. "The Mad Scientist: The Creation of a Literary Stereotype," Science and the Imagination (2004): 59-108.
• Benedict, Barbara. "Readers, Writers, Reviewers, and the Professionalization of Literature," The Cambridge Companion to Literature, 1740-1830, eds. Tom Keymer and Jon Mee, Cambridge University Press (2004): 3-23.
• Benedict, Barbara. "Jane Austen and The Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy." In Revising Women: Feminist Essays in Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider,  Johns Hopkins University Press (2000): 147-199.

• The Noel Memorial Library Fellowship, 2003.
• The Bibliographical Society of America Fellowship, 2002.
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, 1997-8.
• William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship, 1997-8.
• Mellon Residential Fellowship to the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, 1997-8.
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, 1993-94.
• McMaster University and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship, 1990-91.
• William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship, 1990-91.
• The Newberry Library and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship, 1990-91.
• National Endowment for the Humanities Travel to Collections Grant, 1990-91.