For the former president of Vassar College, see Frances D. Fergusson

Frances D. Fergusson

Frances Daly Fergusson served as president of Vassar College from 1986 to 2006. A graduate of Wellesley College, Fergusson earned her A.M. and Ph.D...

Frances Ferguson (born 23 August 1947) is a literary and cultural theorist who teaches courses in eighteenth and nineteenth century materials and twentieth century literary theory at Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently Mary Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Arts and Sciences at the university.

Ferguson has taught courses on the rise of novelism in the eighteenth century; poetic, novelistic, and essayistic writing in the Romantic period; the rise of educational philosophy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the rise of legal philosophy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; 20th century literary theory; and the poststructuralist critique of the social sciences. She is active in Johns Hopkins University's Program for Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

She has written three books (Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 1977; Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, 1992; and Pornography, The Theory, 2005). She is currently working on a project that aims to identify the difference that Locke

John Locke

John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...

, Rousseau, Kant

KANT

KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...

 and Bentham

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...

's work on children and education made to their accounts of modern democratic political liberalism.