Mary Jacobus was a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University,  from 1971 to 1980, after doing her BA and DPhil. at Oxford.  In 1980  she moved to Cornell University, where she held the John Wendell Anderson Chair of English and Women's Studies. In 2000 she returned to the UK  as Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Professorial Fellow of Churchill College. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the AHRC, and is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She was Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) from 2006-11. Her  past work has focused on Romanticism, feminist criticism and theory, and Continental and British psychoanalysis. She has written widely on literature, feminism, psychoanalysis, as well as visual culture, and is currently working on the artist Cy Twombly. Besides her  commitment to feminism and to the humanities, she is passionately committed to fostering disciplinary change, and to promoting the role of Humanities Centres and Institutes of Advanced Study in the global academy. Her work is both literary and interdisciplinary, and has been energized by the range of projects and disciplines represented at CRASSH.