John Richetti received his graduate degrees from Columbia University, where he specialized in eighteenth-century English literature, and wrote his dissertation at University College, London as a Fulbright and a Danforth Fellow. He has taught at Columbia, at Stanford, at New York University, and for many years at Rutgers, where he received the Lindback Award for distinguished teaching. He has held fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His books include: Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739; Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures; Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume; The English Novel in History, 1700-1780; and The Life of Daniel Defoe (2005). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, The Columbia History of the British Novel, and (with Paula Backscheider) Popular Fiction by Women: 1660-1740. He is the editor of the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century volume of the New Cambridge History of English Literature (2005). In 2006 he was awarded the Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching in SAS.