Professor Rosalind Margaret Ballaster FBA

Summary

Ros Ballaster is a Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow in English at Mansfield College.

Born in Mumbai, India, Ros Ballaster took her BA (1984) and DPhil (1989) in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

From 1988 to 1989 she held a Fulbright Scholarship in combination with funding from the British Federation of University Women at the University of Harvard.

Her first academic appointment was at the University of East Anglia, before taking up her post at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, in 1993.

She is a literary historian with a particular interest in the history of narrative and performance, feminist and cognitive theory and has published over forty essays in journals and essay collections. Three monographs explore the significance to the so-called ‘rise’ of the novel in eighteenth-century England of romance fiction and women’s writing (Seductive Forms, 1992), the oriental tale (Fabulous Orients, 2005), plays and theatrical culture (Fictions of Presence, 2020).

She has also edited works by Jane Austen, Delarivier Manley, and Aphra Behn, a collection of oriental tales (Fables of the East, 2005), and an anthology (Jane Austen’s Fashion Bible, 2025).

In 2006, Ballaster was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy for Fabulous Orients (funded by a Major Leverhulme Fellowship).

Her media work includes appearances on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and Woman’s Hour. She was one of the founding scholars of the Master’s degree in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford in 2005, and from 2017 to 2021 was Chair of the Faculty Board in English at Oxford.