Vicki Mahaffey received her Ph.D. from Princeton, with a specialty in Modernism and modern Irish literature. Her /Reauthorizing Joyce/ was published in hardcover by Cambridge University Press and in paperback by Florida University Press. /States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment/ was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. She has received Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Lindback Award for teaching; she is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation. She is currently finishing two books: Literary Modernism: An Introduction, and The Joyce of Everyday Life.

Since retiring from Penn, Prof. Mahaffey has held the chair of Modern Literature at the University of York, England, and she is currently the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Chair of English and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois.