Ruth Perry (literary scholar)

Perry conducts research on 18th century English literature and the role of socio-economic foundations in women's authorship. She has published on authors such as Jane Austen, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, and Samuel Richardson. She has also published on contemporary authors such as Grace Paley and Mary Gordon. She rediscovered the early feminist Mary Astell and wrote a major monograph on her. She edited a new edition of Charlotte Lennox Henrietta. She worked on the 18th century ballad collector and singer Anna Gordon and has already released a volume Ballads and Songs in the Eighteenth Century. In addition to her editorships and monographs, she has published more than twenty articles and reviews in literary journals. She described her own political stance as feminist and anarchist.

Perry has received a variety of grants, awards, and research funding, including a 1964 Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She received an award from the Bunting Institute (1978), the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio , she was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1987, and received research funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980) and the National Science Foundation (1984). In 2000 she was elected President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She was a member of the advisory board of the literary organizations "PMLA" (Publications of the Modern Language Association), "The Women's Review of Books" and "Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature". She is also a member of the Modern Language Association of America and Phi Beta Kappa.

Perry studied at Cornell University, graduating in 1963, and completed an MA in physiological psychology in 1965. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, she received her PhD in 1974 in literature. She began her academic career in 1964 at Ithaca College as a teaching assistant in child psychology. In 1972, she went to MIT, where she became assistant professor of literature in 1973, and in 1980 she became senior lecturer there. At MIT, she co-founded and was the Founding Director of the Women's Studies program (now Women and Gender Studies) in September 1984 and the Boston Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies in 1992. In 1987 after a long and arduous process, Perry was awarded tenure at MIT.

Ruth Anna Perry (born Ruth Opler; April 5, 1943) is an American literary scholar and women's researcher. She is Professor Emeritus of Literary Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.