Harriet Guest studied for her BA and PhD at King's College, Cambridge, where she also held a Junior Research Fellowship. She taught at University College London before moving to York where she is Professor of English and Related Literature. She is a founder member of York's interdisciplinary Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. In recent years she has published widely in two areas; on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British women's writing, which was the subject of her book, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago, 2000), and on British expansion in the South Pacific, which was the focus of her book, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: James Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge,2007).