Lynn Festa

Lynn Festa is a Professor of English and Associate Chair of the English Department at Rutgers University, where she has been since 2008. Her research focuses on 18th-century British and French literature, with expertise in thing theory, animal studies, postcolonial theory, and colonial histories. She holds a PhD and MA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Yale University.

Her major works include Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (2019) and Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (2006), both recognized with prestigious awards such as the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize and the Oscar Kenshur Prize. She co-edited The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Postcolonial Theory (2009).

Festa has received multiple national fellowships, including Radcliffe Institute and ACLS Ryskamp Fellowships, and has delivered over 120 scholarly talks globally. Her teaching spans courses on empire, animal studies, narrative theory, and Jane Austen, earning her the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and Roslyn Abramson Award.

Her research explores how 18th-century literature shaped concepts of human difference, empire, and material culture. Recent articles analyze topics like the 1796 dog tax, wigs as symbols of identity, and Tahitian ethnography through an Enlightenment lens.