gillian beer, born 1935
Professor of English Literature
Following teaching posts at Bedford College, London and the University of Liverpool, Dame Gillian Beer 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 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.
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