Janet Beer

Who is Janet Beer?

Professor Janet Beer is the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University. She took over from Graham Upton in September 2007, having previously been Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences at Manchester Metropolitan University. On the 31st of July 2014 it was announced that Beer would replace Sir Howard Newby as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, and will take up her new position on the 1st of February 2015.

She is a graduate of Reading and Warwick Universities and held a fellowship at Yale University. She worked for the Inner London Education Authority between 1983 and 1989 and has fulfilled academic and leadership roles at Warwick, Roehampton and Manchester Metropolitan.

Professor Beer has an established record of research in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture and contemporary Canadian women’s writing. She has written a number of books about Edith Wharton, most recently, in 2011, 'Sex, Satire and the Older Woman'. She has published widely on early twentieth-century American literary figures, transatlantic relationships and cultures.