Guillory "grew up in
New Orleans in a working-class
Catholic family, and attended
Jesuit schools." He graduated
Phi Beta Kappa from
Tulane University in 1974, and earned a PhD in English from
Yale University in 1979. His doctoral thesis, "Poetry and Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History," was subsequently revised as his first
monograph. Guillory taught at
Yale University (1979–89),
Johns Hopkins University (1989–97), and
Harvard University (1997–99) before moving to New York University in 1999. He has served on the Executive Committee of the
Folger Shakespeare Library; on the Supervisory Board of the English Institute; on the Editorial Board of the journals
Profession and
English Literary History; and on the Executive Council, the Prize Committee for First Book Publication, the Committee on Professional Employment, and the Committee on the Bibliography of the Teaching of Literature for the
Modern Language Association. Guillory's book
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) argued that "the category of 'literature' names the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system". After an opening chapter on the debate over the
literary canon,
Cultural Capital took up several 'case studies':
Thomas Gray's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the
close reading of
New Criticism, and
literary theory after
Paul De Man. Guillory viewed the rigour of '
Theory' as an attempt by literary scholars to reclaim its cultural capital from a newly ascendant technical professional class. Its unconscious aim was "to model the intellectual work of the theorist on the new social form of intellectual work, the technobureaucratic labour of the new
professional-managerial class," "as
Barbara and
John Ehrenreich termed it." While the title phrase "
cultural capital" invokes the
sociology of
Pierre Bourdieu, Guillory has said that "The book that I’m always trying to point people toward is
Alvin Gouldner’s work
The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. That’s where I originally started to think about the issue of the professional managerial class and the possibility of thinking about literary study in the context of the sociology of professions." A final chapter gave a history of the concept of
value from
Adam Smith to
Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Guillory's
Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) was an "attempt to disabuse literary scholars, literary professionals, from the idealizations that we cling to so strongly and don’t want to give up." Critic
Stefan Collini called the volume "the most penetrating, and in some ways most original, study we have of the forces that have shaped the history of literary study, especially in the US." In December 2024, Guillory delivered the keynote address at The Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) on "
Scholarship, Activism, and the Autonomy of Social Spheres," described as "an attempt to clarify a longstanding controversy in the history of humanities scholarship in the university, namely its relation to political activism, and to the political in general." In May 2025, Guillory gave the
British Academy Lecture at
Queen's University Belfast, titled: "'It’s not what you know, it’s who you know': The Problem of Social Capital," applying
"Bourdieu’s theory to an analysis of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel
The Great Gatsby (1925), with the aim of establishing the relation between
cultural capital and
social capital as two forms of 'knowing.' This relation correlates
Gatsby's desire for social capital, which he uses to pursue
Daisy Buchanan, as part of Fitzgerald's bid for the text’s
canonical status as a '
great' American novel." Guillory is currently writing a book entitled
Freedom of Thought: Philosophy and Literature in the English Renaissance. == Awards and honors ==