Prof Gillian Beer, Clare Hall

gpb1000@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I studied for the BA and BLitt at St Anne’s College, Oxford and was then appointed as Assistant Lecturer at Bedford College, University of London followed by two years at the University of Liverpool. In 1965 I was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College Cambridge and remained there as a teaching Fellow for twenty nine years before being elected as President at Clare Hall College in 1994, the same year that I became King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty, having previously served as Grace I Professor. After my retirement from Cambridge I was invited to become Senior Research Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art and spent time there annually for five years.

I am a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Overseas Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. I have twice served as a Man Booker Prize judge, the second time as Chair, and also of the Women’s Prize. Eleven universities have awarded me Honorary Doctorates: London, Liverpool, Harvard, the Sorbonne, St Andrews, Leicester, Oxford, Queens Belfast, Chichester, Anglia Ruskin and Ghent. When in 1998 I was made a Dame, the announcement cited my contribution to English literature.

Research Interests

Much of my research has concerned the interactions of science, culture, and literature, in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. I’ve been especially interested in how unlike things relate to each other and how knowledge is transformed when it moves into a different context. My primary example has been the work and imagination of Charles Darwin. I’ve written about a number of women writers, particularly George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Vernon Lee, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and also about rhyming and the process of reading.

After a long and happy time working over many years with undergraduates and PhD students, I have now retired and no longer teach regularly for the Faculty.

Selected Publications

Meredith: a Change of Masks, 1970

The Romance,1970

Darwin’s Plots, 1983, third edition 2009. Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the British Academy.

Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, 1996

Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground, 1996

Alice in Space: the Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll, 2018. Winner of the Truman Capote Prize.

I have edited works by Sigmund Freud, H.G.Wells, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf. The subjects of my essays range from Alexander Pope to Ali Smith, and their topics include the astronomer Arthur Eddington in relation to the rise of modernism, wave theory and early twentieth century literature, Darwin and the descent of women, rhyming as resurrection, and the role of the resistant reader.