Jenny Davidson is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She received an AB from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1993, and her PhD from Yale in 1999. Professor Davidson writes about eighteenth-century literature and culture, and her other interests include British cultural and intellectual history and the contemporary novel in English. Her honors include a Lenfest Distinguished Teaching Award (2005), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005-2006) and the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award (2010). She is the author of four novels, Heredity (2003), The Explosionist (2008), Invisible Things (2010), and The Magic Circle, forthcoming in 2013. She has published two academic books, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge, 2004) and Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (Columbia, 2009). Her book Reading Style will be published in 2014 by Columbia University Press, and she is currently working on a project called The ABCs of the Novel.