Title: Professor of English; Associate Dean, College of Arts and Science

Program: Women's and Gender Studies
Department: English

Office: 301 Kirkland Hall
Phone: 615-322-7360
Fax: 615-343-8702
Email: carolyn.dever@vanderbilt.edu

Publications

• Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
• The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, edited with Margaret Cohen (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Biography

Carolyn Dever received her undergraduate degree from Boston College in 1988 and her Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1993. She became an assistant professor of English at New York University in 1993 and earned tenure in 1999. While at NYU, she directed graduate studies in English and the NYU Summer in London Program, and was awarded the university’s “Golden Dozen” award for undergraduate teaching. Since arriving at Vanderbilt in 2000, she has taught courses in both English and Women’s and Gender Studies on topics ranging from Victorian fiction, prose, and poetry to contemporary feminist and gender theories. She has directed graduate studies in English, co-directed the Faculty Fellows Program on “Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Politics” at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and served as Acting Director of the Program in Women’s Studies. She now serves as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science, with responsibility for graduate education in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

Dever’s research is focused in the fields of Victorian literature, gender studies, and literary theory. She has published two books, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice ( University of Minnesota Press , 2004), and co-edited The Literary Channel: The Trans-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton University Press, 2001). Her book in progress, Queer Domesticities: Art and Intimacy in Victorian Britain, addresses questions of sexuality and aesthetic practice in Victorian British discourses of domestic life. In 2006-7 she and Professor Gregg Horowitz (Philosophy) will direct the Humanities Center Faculty Fellows interdisciplinary seminar “Between Word and Image,” on the relationship between language and visual artifacts.