Janet Beer is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. She was previously a Professor and Head of the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University and has also taught at Warwick University, Yale University - where she held fellowship - and the Roehampton Institute London. Her main areas of scholarship are early twentieth-century literature generally and Edith Wharton studies in particular. She has written introductions to four Wharton texts including The Age of Innocence (1995) as well as two full studies: Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters (1995) and Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction (1997).
