Prof Dame Gillian Beer, DBE, FBA

Career: asst lectr Bedford Coll London 1959-62, pt/t lectr Univ of Liverpool 1962-64; Univ of Cambridge: fell Girton Coll 1965-94, asst lectr 1966-71, lectr then reader in literature and narrative 1971-89, Grace I prof of English 1989-94, pres Clare Hall 1994-2001, King Edward VII prof 1994-2002; vice-pres Br Acad 1994-96 (res reader 1987-89); chair Poetry Book Soc 1993-96, pres Br Assoc of Comparative Literature 2003-10, pres Br Soc of Literature and Science 2004, pres Modern Humanities Research Assoc 2011; memb: Cwlth Scholarship Cmmn 1987-94, Bd of Tstees of British Museum 1992-2002; Andrew W Mellon sr fell Yale Center for Br Art 2009-11; Gold medallist MIT 2001; Hon LittD: Univ of Liverpool 1996, Anglia Poly Univ 1998, Univ of Leicester 1999, Univ of London 2001, Université de Paris Sorbonne 2001, Univ of Oxford 2005, Queen's Univ Belfast 2005, Harvard Univ 2012; hon fell: Clare Hall Coll Cambridge, St Anne's Coll Oxford, Girton Coll Cambridge, Univ of Wales Cardiff; hon foreign memb American Acad of Arts and Scis, int memb American Philosophical Soc 2010; FBA, FRSL 2006

Books and Publications: Meredith: A Change of Masks (1970), The Romance (1970), Darwin's Plots (1983, 3 edn 2009), George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past (1989), Forging the Missing Link (1992), Open Fields (1996), Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996)