Penny Pritchardis a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature, and has taught at the University of Hertfordshire since completing her PhD in 2006. Both her doctoral thesis (entitled 'Defoe, Rhetoric, and Nonconformity') and MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies were undertaken at the University of East Anglia. Her first book, (The Long Eighteenth- Century: Literature from 1660 to 1790), was published by York Press in 2010, and she has written extensively on Defoe and early modern religious writing in academic journals and chapter collections.