Sandra Mayer is a Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow in English Literature. She studied English and History at the universities of Graz, Sussex, and Vienna, where she received her doctorate in English Literature for a thesis on the reception of Oscar Wilde’s works on twentieth-century Viennese stages. Her book, Oscar Wilde in Vienna, was published by Brill Rodopi in 2018. In 2014, she was awarded an Erwin Schrödinger Research Fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) to undertake postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford’s English Faculty and Wolfson College, where she worked on a project exploring the intersections of literature, politics, and Victorian celebrity culture in the life and career of Benjamin Disraeli. This research forms part of her current FWF-funded project Art and Action, which investigates the complex interrelations of literary celebrity and politics in and through autobiographical life-writing genres. She also holds a postdoctoral research affiliation with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she co-ordinates the Centre’s “Life-Writing and Celebrity” research strand. Her co-edited special issue on "Life Writing and Celebrity" for Life Writing has just been published as an edited volume by Routledge. 

She is currently organising a conference on "Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture", hosted by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, in March 2020. More information is available here. 

Please note: Due to the ongoing COVID-19 global health crisis, this event had to be cancelled and will be rescheduled in due course. 

• literary celebrity and authorship
• life-writing
• cultural transfer and reception studies
• literary networks and cosmopolitanism
• literature and culture of the Victorian Age and the Fin de Siècle
• Neo-Victorianism

• Workshop "Writing Activism" (with Katherine Collins), The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 26 February 2019
• Discussion panel "Literary Celebrity and Political Persona" (Kirsty Gunn, P David Marshall, Rachel Potter), Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, 14 May 2018
• Day symposium "Transnational Lives and Cosmopolitan Biographies" (co-organised with Philip Ross Bullock), Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, 17 March 2018
• Half-day colloquium "Life-Writing and Female Celebrity", Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, 4 November 2017
• Day symposium "Celebiography: Celebrity and Life-Writing in Dialogue", Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, 19 November 2016
• Day symposium "Art and Action: The Intersections of Literary Celebrity and Politics", The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 5 March 2016
• Lecture series "Cultures of Celebrity", English Department, University of Vienna, winter term 2015/16
• Day symposium "The Many Lives of Benjamin Disraeli", The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 24 March 2015