Raymond J. Ricketts received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  He is currently working on a book on dance and aesthetics in eighteenth-century English literature. His article, "Manly Airs: Locke's Moral Education and Dance in The Spectator," appears in Annals of Scholarship. He received an MA in English from Rutgers after graduating summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in English and Philosophy. He has taught classes in the history of British literature, eighteenth-century English literature, poetry, performance studies, literary theory, and composition. In 2001-02, he was a fellow at Rutgers's Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, and he has presented papers at the conferences of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and others. He has worked as an editor and researcher at Raritan, Library of America, and Oxford University Press. A former professional ballet dancer, he has written and lectured extensively on ballet and dance.