Brett Wilson received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and his B.A. from Dartmouth College.

His dissertation, "Maudlin Whigs: Gender, Feeling, and Party on the British Stage, 1688-1746," reads eighteenth-century sentimental drama as political theater, linking the early emergence of a culture of sensibility to Hanoverian succession and Jacobite peril.

He is generally interested in the ways in which writers associate or dissociate gender, emotion, and political discourse. He has presented several papers on the relations between partisan politics and the stage in the long eighteenth century, as well as on the history of the novel and the use of digital resources in humanities teaching and research.

At Penn, he has taught classes in the novel, drama, nonfiction, and poetry, covering the Middle Ages to the present but particularly centering on the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Further teaching interests include gender studies (in which he holds a Graduate Certificate) and the history of political thought.