Dr. Rita J. Dashwood is a literary scholar and historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her research focuses on women, property and cultural heritage, and the Romantic period's legacies in popular culture. She is a Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University, where she is working on her third book, The Heiress: Single Women and Property in British Literature and History, 1780-1900. She has received multiple awards throughout her career, including the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies' President's Prize for her research on Austen.