Ruth Perry is past President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and an internationally acclaimed authority on eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She has written on canonical figures such as Pope, Sterne, Richardson, Austen, Hawthorne as well as contemporary women writers such as Grace Paley and Mary Gordon. She is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at MIT and the founding director of Women Studies at MIT as well as the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies in Boston. In 2022, the Eighteenth-Century Society for Scottish Studies honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Her scholarship has been recognized by fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Edinburgh.