Janet Beer

Professor Dame Janet Patricia Beer, is a British academic who served as the Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from February 2015 until December 2022. She took over from Howard Newby, having previously been Vice-Chancellor at Oxford Brookes University and Pro-Vice Chancellor Academic and Dean of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Education and career

Dame Janet is a graduate of the University of Reading and Warwick University and held a fellowship at Yale University. She worked for the Inner London Education Authority between 1983 and 1989 and fulfilled academic and leadership roles at Warwick, Roehampton and Manchester Metropolitan. She then up took office as President of Universities UK in August 2017, serving until July 2019.

Dame Janet is a member of the Advisory Board for the Government Skills and Curriculum Unit, Patron of the Mark Evison Foundation, Chair of the Sport and Recreation Alliance, an Independent Governor of Northumbria University, a Director of the Board of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts, a Trustee of the Royal Anniversary Trust, a Member of the Education Honours Committee, and a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum.

Research and publications

Dame Janet 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' (co-authored with Avril Horner). She has published widely on early twentieth-century American literary figures, transatlantic relationships and cultures.

Selected works