Carolyn Dever is a scholar and teacher of British literature and culture of the nineteenth century. She is the author of Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press, 2022), and the editor of One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field (Princeton University Press, 2023). The Guggenheim Foundation has supported work on Dever's new book, Habits of Love: An Autobiography of My Mother, with a special fellowship supported by a gift from Wendy Belzberg and Strauss Zelnick in honor of Stacy Schiff, a 1996 Fellow in Biography and a Trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation. With Amy Kahrmann Huseby, Dever is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Victorian Women's Writing (forthcoming 2026).

Dever's earlier books include Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge), Skeptical Feminisms: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (Minnesota), The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton), and The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope (Cambridge).  

In partnership with a team of scholars worldwide, Dever leads the Michael Field Diary project: michaelfielddiary.dartmouth.edu.

Dever has served extensively in higher education leadership, including as Dartmouth's provost and chief budget officer, and as dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding partner of Dever Justice LLC, which works to support professional and leadership development for faculty members worldwide. Dever serves on the boards of the ACLU-NH, the Howe Library Corporation, and the Public Books Foundation, and the advisory boards of the Johns Hopkins University Press and PMLA.