Professor Dame Janet Patricia Beer,[1] DBE is a British academic who served as the Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from February 2015 until December 2022.
[4] Dame Janet came to the end of her term of office as Chair of the University Alliance in 2012; from 2000 until 2007 she was a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Education & Skills Select Committee; she has served a full term as a Board Member at the HEA and was founding Chair of the PVC Network; she was an Editorial Board member on 'The Journal of American Studies from 1997 to 2011, Associate Editor of 'The Year's Work in English Studies' from 1999 to 2007 and a Director of Carcanet Press from 1999 to 2006; she was a member of the Peer Review Panel for English at the AHRC from 2000 to 2005 and was subsequently a member of the Peer Review College; she has also fulfilled a variety of different Board and Chairing roles for the QAA, Leadership Foundation, British Association for American Studies, the Fulbright Commission and the Council of University Deans of Arts and Humanities.
She previously chaired the Equality Challenge Unit and served as Vice President of Universities UK, England and Northern Ireland.
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).