Karen Lawrence is Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at U.C. Irvine. She was educated at Smith College and Yale University (B.A. magna cum laude, 1971), received her masters degree from Tufts University in 1973, and her doctorate, with distinction, from Columbia University in 1978. She was Professor of English at the University of Utah from 1978 to 1997 and served as a visiting lecturer at many colleges and universities in this country and at the International Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. Her major research and teaching interests include twentieth-century literature, travel writing, feminist theory, and the novel. She has written extensively on twentieth-century fiction, particularly on the works of James Joyce. Her books include The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton); Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Cornell); The McGraw-Hill Guide to English Literature; Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century "British" Literary Canons (Illinois); and Transcultural Joyce (Cambridge University Press). Karen has been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ramona Cannon Award for distinguished teaching at the University of Utah, and the Rosenblatt Prize, awarded annually to the outstanding University of Utah faculty member for achievements in scholarship, teaching, and administration. She served as President of the International James Joyce Foundation and President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. She is a member of the English Literature Board of the Graduate Record Examination and she currently co-chairs the University of California Humanities Commission. She has served as UCI's Dean of Humanities since 1998.