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Carolyn Dever
Carolyn Dever
 Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science

Title: Professor of English; Dean of the College of Arts and Science

Department: English

Office: 301 Kirkland Hall
Phone: 615-322-2851
Fax: 615-343-8702
Email: carolyn.dever@vanderbilt.edu

Degrees

  • BA in English, Boston College, 1988.
  • Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University, 1993.

Research Area

  • Victorian literature and culture.
  • Gender studies.

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. She was awarded the Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and completed the Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University in 1993.

Dever began her career at New York University in 1993. As a member of the English Department, her teaching and research focused on Victorian literature and studies of gender. Dever was awarded NYU’s “Golden Dozen” award for undergraduate teaching. She was a three-time director of the NYU Summer in London Program, and also directed graduate studies in English. With the support of an ACLS Fellowship, she published her first book, Death and the Mother From Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, with Cambridge University Press in 1998, and was awarded tenure at NYU in 1999.

Since arriving at Vanderbilt in 2000, Dever has taught courses in both English and Women’s and Gender Studies on topics ranging from Victorian fiction, prose, and poetry to gender, sexuality, and modernist literature. She has directed graduate studies in English, co-directed two Faculty Fellows programs at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and served as Acting Director of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies. Following publication of her second book, Skeptical Feminisms: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (Minnesota, 2004) and an edited collection, The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton, 2002), Dever was promoted to Professor of English in 2005. She served for two years as the first Associate Dean for graduate education in the College of Arts and Science, and after a year-long research sabbatical, returned to the Arts and Science Dean’s Office in 2007 as Executive Dean, with responsibilities for faculty actions and research. She became Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Science in June 2008.

Dever has several active research projects underway. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, a book scheduled for publication in late 2009. She travels to London frequently for research at the British Library on the manuscript diaries of the late-Victorian poet and playwright “Michael Field”—the pseudonym for a collaborative pair of women writers, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. Dever’s research on Michael Field has led to further research on poetry and the visual arts in late-Victorian Britain, and will culminate in a book about intimacy, domesticity, and art in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Dever directs the research of a number of Vanderbilt graduate students on topics relating to Victorian literature and culture.