Betsy Gitter received her PhD degree from Yale University and specializes in the Victorian period. At John Jay, she was a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, in which she has taught for most of her career. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Dickens Studies Annual, Dickens Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, TLS, and PMLA. She is the author of The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2001; Picador: 2003), which was awarded the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction.