Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Research Professor in the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, is a leading historian of European fairy tales. Her conclusion that the most popular modern fairy tale plot originated in Renaissance Venice has been hotly contested and occasioned the October 2010 issue of the Journal of American Folklore. Her recent publications include Fairy Tales: A New History (2009), Gender and Story in South India, ed. with Lalita Handoo and Leela Prasad (2007), and Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (2002). Past publications include The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to the Present (1996), Grimm’s Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales (1987), and Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm, ed. (1987), as well as articles on European fairy tales, the history of illustration, and the socialisation of children through Bible narratives. She also reviews widely, has contributed numerous encyclopedia articles, and has translated many scholarly articles into English.

She is a Life Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, held a seven-year visiting fellowship at Magdalen College Oxford 1997-2004), and has taught at Princeton University, Hollins University, and the Universities of Innsbruck, Göttingen, Siegen, and Vienna. An active member of professional organisations in the fields of folk narrative and children’s literature, she also serves on the editorial boards of scholarly journals in her fields and is continuing research in the history of early British children’s literature and the overall history of fairy tales in Europe and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century overseas colonies.

Ongoing research includes shifting relationships between magic and heroes and heroines in tales of the fantastic from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance, fairy tale authors’ prefaces to and comments on their own works (from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century), and the literary basis of fairy tales that have become so widely known that they are routinely used in film, commerce, and literature, as well as told by ordinary people.