Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, DBE , FBA (née Thomas;born 27 January 1935) is a British literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001,and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2002.
Born Gillian Patricia Kempster Thomas in Surrey,England, [1] Beer studied English Literature at St Anne's College,Oxford.
Following teaching posts at Bedford College,London,and the University of Liverpool,she was a fellow of Girton College,Cambridge,for 30 years. She was later King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge,and later president of Clare Hall,the University of Cambridge's distinctive,international postgraduate college.
She served as chair of the judges for the Booker Prize in 1997.
Her most intensive literary criticism lies in the field of Victorian studies. Darwin's Plots (1983),in particular,related the form of Victorian novels to Darwinist thinking. Its significance as a work was confirmed by the publication of a second edition by Cambridge University Press in 2000 and a third edition in 2009. She has also written important collections of essays on Virginia Woolf (The Common Ground,1996) and on other aspects of the relations of literature,science,and other academic disciplines. [2]
She married the literary critic John Beer in September 1962; [7] they have three sons.
Sir Leslie Stephen was an English author,critic,historian,biographer,mountaineer,and an early humanist activist. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy,known professionally by her former married name,A. S. Byatt,was an English critic,novelist,poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Clare Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1966 by Clare College,Clare Hall is a college for advanced study,admitting only postgraduate students alongside postdoctoral researchers and fellows. It was established to serve as an Institute of Advanced Studies and has slowly grown and developed into a full constituent college.
Sir Geoffrey William Hill,FRSL was an English poet,professor emeritus of English literature and religion,and former co-director of the Editorial Institute,at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language." From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings,and the publication of Broken Hierarchies,Hill is recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry and criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Francis George Steiner,FBA was a Franco-American literary critic,essayist,philosopher,novelist and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language,literature and society,as well as the impact of the Holocaust. A 2001 article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath".
The King Edward VII Professorship of English Literature is one of the senior professorships in literature at the University of Cambridge,and was founded by a donation from Sir Harold Harmsworth in 1910 in memory of King Edward VII who had died earlier that year.
Malcolm McNaughtan Bowie FBA was a British academic,and Master of Christ's College,Cambridge from 2002 to 2006. An acclaimed scholar of French literature,Bowie wrote several books on Marcel Proust,as well as books on Mallarmé
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic,feminist,and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia,developing the concept and practice of gynocritics,a term describing the study of "women as writers".
Dame Hermione Lee,is a British biographer,literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College,Oxford,and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Dame Marina Sarah Warner,is an English historian,mythographer,art critic,novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications,including The London Review of Books,the New Statesman,Sunday Times, and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor,given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation,the Language of Physical Pain,and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art,Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature,both in the English and Irish languages,which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in the academic study of children's literature. He serves on the advisory board of the International Review of Irish Culture and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and at its campus in Dublin. In recent years and with publications such as After Ireland (2018),Kiberd has become a commentator on contemporary Irish social and political issues,particularly as such issues have been examined by Ireland's writers.
The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Literary Trust. The value of the award is $30,000 (USD),and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language. The formal name of the prize is the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin,commemorating both Capote and his friend Newton Arvin,who was a distinguished critic and Smith College professor until he lost his job in 1960 after his homosexuality was publicly exposed.
Dame Frances Clare Kirwan,is a British mathematician,currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry.
Dame Jean Olwen Thomas,is a Welsh biochemist,former Master of St Catharine's College,Cambridge,and Chancellor of Swansea University.
Jane de Gay is a British academic and lecturer who has earned an international reputation as an expert on the life and works of Virginia Woolf. de Gay's works on Woolf include a series of articles and a 2006 book,Virginia Woolf's Novels and the Literary Past,published by Edinburgh University Press. Her work has been recognised by the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. She has co-edited four books on gender and theatre,including Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women.
Elinor Shaffer is a professor at the School of Advanced Study,University of London,honorary professor at University College,London,editor of the Comparative Literature series of Legenda (imprint),and editor of Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe,a book series published by Continuum Books.
Seth Lerer is an American scholar and Professor of English. He specializes in historical analyses of the English language,and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors,particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California,San Diego,where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature:A Readers’History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
Helen Wenda Small is the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Merton College,Oxford. She was previously a fellow of Pembroke College,Oxford.
The Truman Capote Literary Trust is an American charitable trust established in 1994 by Truman Capote's literary executor,Alan U. Schwartz,pursuant to Capote's will.