Dr Penny Pritchard holds a BA from the University of Oxford and a Phd from the University of East Anglia. She has a wide range of post-16 teaching experience and is a lecturer in English Literature and Language at the University of Hertfordshire. Here she is the Module leader for the Eighteenth Century, and teaches on Restoration, Eighteenth Century and Renaissance modules. She has contributed an essay on Defoe's Nonconformist background and rhetoric to the forthcoming Cambridge Scholars volume Positioning Daniel Defoe's Non-fiction: Form, Genre and Function, and also a chapter on the funeral sermon to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the English Sermon.Penny has published extensive entries on Defoe's biography and literary works for various online directories, including the Literary Encyclopedia and the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies. She is a member of BSECS and has chaired panels at their annual conference, as well as giving several seminar and conference papers here and at institutions round the country. She is also a member of the Defoe Society.