Margaret Doody

Doody's areas of expertise are in Restoration and 18th-Century British Literature and in the Novel. She is an acknowledged expert on Richardson, Burney, Swift and Jane Austen, and on the history of prose fiction. She is a regular contributor to LRB and TLS. Recent talks and papers include a presentation on Swift and Edgeworth at the International Irish Studies Conference in Prague, and the plenary talk on "the Fantastic Burney" at the Burney Society. Doody is the author of a series of mystery novels with Aristotle as the central character, translated into many languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and Russian. The latest is Mysteries of Eleusis (2005). Current academic interests include the intellectual and cultural influence of Paracelsus and Jakob Boehme. She is finishing a book on Venice, a longtime passion, to be published in the fall of 2006 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.