Vicki Mahaffey received a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of York (U.K.), and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (as the Thelma and Clayton Kirkpatrick Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies); she was also the Carol and Gordon Segal Distinguished Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at Northwestern University.
A Guggenheim fellow, she has authored or edited seven books, and she has published more than fifty articles on Irish Studies, Modernist literature, and gender and sexuality.