Kathryn Shevelow

Kathryn Shevelow grew up in southwestern Ohio. Her parents were public school teachers, and she has three younger sisters. As an adult, she moved to the west coast for graduate school, and got her PhD at the University of California, San Diego, where she is now a faculty member in the Literature Department. Her first book, "Women and Print Culture," was about the invention of magazines for women in 18th-century England. More recently, she wrote "Charlotte," a biography of the scandalous 18th-century cross-dressing actress, Charlotte Charke, which was the winner of the Theatre Library Association's George Freedley Memorial Award for the year's best book on live theater. Her newest book, "For the Love of Animals," combines her life-long concern for animal welfare with her knowledge of 18th and 19th century England to tell the story of how society's changing attitudes towards animals enabled a collection of extraordinary people, working over many years, to pass the world's first animal welfare law and to found the SPCA, the world's first animal protection society.