Ruth Perry
Meet Ruth
Ruth Perry is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of the Humanities, Emerita, and Professor Emerita of Literature at MIT. An internationally recognized scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, women’s cultural history, and oral tradition, she is the author of Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown of Falkland (Oxford University Press, July 2025), a landmark biography of the celebrated Scottish ballad singer whose repertoire helped shape the Anglo-Scottish tradition.
Perry has written extensively on figures ranging from Pope, Sterne, Richardson, and Austen to contemporary women writers, and her work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Edinburgh. A past President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, she is also the founding director of Women’s Studies at MIT and the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies in Boston. In 2022, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Eighteenth-Century Society for Scottish Studies.