Carol H MacKay is the J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor of English Literature and University Distinguished Teaching Professor. Her research explores the Victorian novel, women's studies, and autobiography, with a focus on authors including William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Julia Margaret Cameron, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Annie Besant, Elizabeth Robins, and Virginia Woolf.

She is the author or editor of six books:

(Editor and Introductions) Annie Besant’s Autobiographical Sketches . Broadview Press
Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest . Stanford
University Press
(With Edgar F. Harden) The Adventures of Philip. Annotations for the Selected Works of
William Makepeace Thackeray: The Complete Novels, the Major Non-Fictional Prose, and
Selected Shorter Pieces . Garland Reference Library of the Humanities
(Editor and Introduction) Dramatic Dickens . St. Martin’s Press.
(Editor and Introduction) The Two Thackerays: Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s Biographical
Introductions to the Centenary Edition of the Works of William Makepeace Thackeray .
AMS Press.
Soliloquy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Consciousness Creating Itself.Macmillan
and Totowa.