Research Expertise and Interest

19th-century British, critical theory, poetry

Research Description

Sara Guyer researches, writes, and lectures on romanticism and its legacies. She is the author of Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford 2007) and Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (Fordham 2015) and has edited special issues of Diacritics, Romantic Circles, and South Atlantic Quarterly. With Brian McGrath, she coedits the book series Lit Z.

From 2016 to 2022, Guyer served as the President of the international Consortium of Humanites Centers and Institutes (CHCI). She regularly speaks on the global and public humanities and currently edits The World Humanities Report, a large scale project with over a dozen research teams on six continents.

For more than a decade, beginning in 2008, she directed the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Dorothy P. Draheim Professor of English. During this period, she established new coalitions between the public university and public-serving institutions; introduced graduate fellowships and curricula for the public humanities; formed new programs for faculty research; and ran an annual humanities conference for high school students and teachers.

In Fall 2021, Sara Guyer began her term as Dean of Arts & Humanities.