Frances Botkin received her B.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her areas of expertise are British Romanticism, Caribbean literature, and gender studies. She has presented papers and published articles on Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Jack Mansong (a nineteenth-century Jamaican slave rebel). She is currently working on her book project: Rewriting the Colonial Caribbean: A Cultural History of Obi, or "Three-Finger'd Jack".