Dame Gillian Beer
The Uses of Extinction
Dame Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and was President of Clare Hall College for a seven year term, 1994-2001. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature and is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was made Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1998 for services to English literature. She has twice judged the Booker Prize for fiction and is particularly interested in contemporary literature, working now on the Board of the New Writing Partnership and on the Council of Arts Council England East. Among her Honorary Doctorates are those from London and Oxford Universities, and the Sorbonne. She is President of the British Comparative Literature Association and is General Editor of the series Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture.
Her books include George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past (1989), Darwin's Plots (1983; second edition, 2000; third edition forthcoming), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996). More recently she has published a number of essays on Thomas Hardy and on Modernist writing. She is at present finishing a study of Lewis Carroll's Alice books in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual controversies. She has also published a series of essays on rhyming and gave the Poetry Society Annual Lecture in 2007 on 'Rhyming as Intimacy, Rhyming as Radicalism'.