Kathleen Wilson is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has written widely on empire and the politics of culture in eighteenth-century Britain, including The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715-1785, winner of the 1995 Whitfield Prize for British History, Royal Historical Society, and the 1996 John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies.