After studying at
Indiana University, which awarded her a
BA in 1966, Guibbory gained both an
MA and a
PhD from the
University of California, Los Angeles, completing her studies in 1970. She then moved to the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as an assistant professor, and became a full professor in 1989. During her time at the University of Illinois she was awarded the Harriet and Charles Luckman Undergraduate Distinguished Teaching Award, served as an editor of
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and was made a Fellow of the
Huntington Library. Her publications at Illinois included
The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History in 1986 and
Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century English Literature in 1998. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship for 2001. In 2004, having spent a semester there in 2003 as a visiting professor, Guibbory moved to Barnard College to take up a position as Professor of English. During her time at Barnard she has published
The Cambridge Companion to John Donne in 2006, then was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. Her book Christian Identity, Jews and Israel was published by Oxford in 2010 and received an award from the Milton Society of America. In 2010 she also was awarded an honorary
Doctor of Humane Letters from
Iona College. The Milton Society of America named her Honored Milton Scholar for 2018. ==References==