After more than a decade teaching seventh through twelfth grade English in independent schools in Texas and Michigan, Catherine Ross earned a Ph.D. in English at The University of Texas at Austin in 1998.  At UT Austin she served as one of the first Assistant Directors of the Division of Rhetoric and Composition and won UT Austin’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for her study of the relationships between people of science and letters in the long eighteenth century.  This research launched her interest in interdisciplinary studies, Romantic polymathy, and the historical effects of curricula and pedagogy upon writers and other public figures.  In 1998, Dr. Ross joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Tyler, where she is Coordinator of Undergraduate English and a teacher of British Literature, Literature and Science, and College Writing. Presently at work on a book entitled British Learning, 1760-1830, Dr. Ross has also published on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Browning, and the educational prose of the Romantic Period.