... is a literary and cultural historian in the research unit Literary & Print Culture Studies and has a particular interest in the contexts and conditions of literary production and reception. Her expertise lies in the areas of life writing, authorship studies, cultural transfer, reception studies, and digital editing. After holding academic positions and research fellowships at the Universities of Vienna, Oxford, Zurich, and Galway, Sandra joined the ACDH (then called ACDH-CH) in August 2021. She is principal investigator on the digital edition projects Auden Musulin Papers (2021–2024) and Auden in Austria Digital (2024–2027).
As an FWF Elise Richter Fellow, Sandra is also project lead of The Author as Activist: Literature, Politics, and Celebrity (2022–2026), which explores the interplay of literary authorship, political activism, media, and celebrity in and through autobiographical narrative from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Sandra 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.
Publications
- To give a word of sympathy’: Agency, Activism, and Authorial Autobiomyths in Harriet Martineau’s Autobiographical Accounts of Public Speech. / Mayer, Sandra.
Transforming Orality: Articulating Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Hrsg. / Anne-Julia Zwierlein; Katharina Herold-Zanker. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2026. S. 45-63.
Publications before ACDH
- Dessy, Clément, and Sandra Mayer, eds. 2021. Life Writing and the Transnational, special issue for Comparative Critical Studies 18. https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/ccs/18/supplement.
- Mayer, Sandra. 2020. W. H. Auden in Austria: 'Publicly Private' and Globally Local. In Lives of Houses, ed. Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee, 232-245. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Mayer, Sandra, and Julia Novak, eds. 2019. Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections. London: Routledge.
- Mayer, Sandra. 2018. Oscar Wilde in Vienna: Pleasing and Teasing the Audience. Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi.