Rate My Professor Lillian Nayder

Lillian Nayder, Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Bates College, joined the English Department as Assistant Professor in 1989, advancing to Associate Professor in 1996 and full Professor in 2003. She served as Chair of the English Department from 2009 to 2013 and as Humanities Division Chair from 2016 to 2020. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Virginia in 1988 and 1982, respectively, and a B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978. Prior to her tenure at Bates, she held a Bradley Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Virginia from 1988 to 1989. Nayder has received numerous institutional honors, including Enhanced Sabbaticals in 2013–2014 and 2020–2021, a Phillips Fellowship in 1999–2000, Akers Sabbatical Leave Support Grant, and multiple Professional Development Fund Grants and research grants from Bates College. In 2024, Bates announced her appointment to the Charles A. Dana endowed professorship for the term 2022–2032.

Nayder's research focuses on nineteenth-century British fiction, particularly Charles Dickens and his family, Wilkie Collins, and sensation fiction. She is the author of The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Cornell University Press, 2011), the first comprehensive biography of Dickens's wife; Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Cornell University Press, 2002); and Wilkie Collins (Twayne Publishers, 1997). Her publications also include chapters such as “Science and Sensation” in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013), “A Tale of Two Brothers” in Reading Dickens Differently (2020), and numerous articles in Dickens Quarterly and other journals. Nayder's scholarship has broader impact through public outreach, including guest curating the exhibition “The Other Dickens: Discovering Catherine” at the Charles Dickens Museum in London in 2016, BBC Radio and television interviews, and the 2023 Teaching Company lecture series “London in the Time of Dickens.” Current projects include Charles Dickens: A Fraternal Life and Corporeal Dickens. She teaches courses on Jane Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Victorian crime fiction, the Gothic tradition, and medical humanities topics like Fictions of Affliction and The Arctic Sublime.