Patricia Craddock is the author or editor of four books and many articles on Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, including a two-volume biography, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters (1982) and Edward Gibbon: “Luminous” Historian (1989).
Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEH senior fellowships, an ACLS grant-in-aid, and a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). She is the 1997–98 Catherine and Herbert Yardley Professor at the University of Florida. Formerly chair of the Department of English at Boston University, she came to the University of Florida as Professor and Chair of English in 1988 and served as chair until 1994. She has taught also at the University of Montevallo, Connecticut College, and Goucher College, and as a visiting professor at M.I.T.
As editor of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, she published two of the annual volumes of that journal, and she has served on the editorial boards of South Atlantic Review (1996–98),The Age of Johnson (1992–present), and the Georgia Smollett edition (1997–present). She has served as English Book Review editor of The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, the standard interdisciplinary bibliography in eighteenth-century studies.
Professor Craddock’s interests include children’s literature, nineteenth-century fiction and narrative theory in general, and Victorian literature, as well as all aspects of eighteenth-century British culture. She is pursuing a book on The Historical Art of Edward Gibbon, and preparing an online edition of the The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.