Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher. Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud's publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.
Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
Juliet Mitchell, Lady Goody is a British psychoanalyst, socialist feminist, research professor and author.
Barbara Creed is a professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.
Jessica Benjamin is a psychoanalyst known for her contributions to psychoanalysis and social thought. She is currently a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Jessica Benjamin is one of the original contributors to the fields of relational psychoanalysis, theories of intersubjectivity, and gender studies and feminism as it relates to psychoanalysis and society. She is known for her ideas about recognition in both human development and the sociopolitical arena.
Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.
Mary Ann Doane is the Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley and was previously the George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is a pioneer in the study of gender in film.
Naomi Schor was an American literary critic and theorist. A pioneer of feminist theory for her generation, she is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory of her time. Naomi's younger sister is the artist and writer Mira Schor.
Ranjana Khanna is a literary critic and theorist recognized for her interdisciplinary, feminist and internationalist contributions to the fields of post-colonial studies, feminist theory, literature and political philosophy. She is best known for her work on melancholia and psychoanalysis, but has also published extensively on questions of post-colonial agency, film, Algeria, area studies, autobiography, Marxism, the visual and feminist theory. She received her Ph.D in 1993 from the University of York. She has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the University of Utah, and in 2000 began teaching at Duke University, where she is Professor of English, Literature and Women's Studies. Her theorization of subjectivity and sovereignty, including her recent work on disposability, indignity and asylum, engages with the work of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Irigaray, Kant, Marx, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Spivak. From 2007 until 2015, she was the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies, and in July 2017, she was appointed to be the incoming Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, both at Duke University.
Feminist psychology is a form of psychology centered on social structures and gender. Feminist psychology critiques historical psychological research as done from a male perspective with the view that males are the norm. Feminist psychology is oriented on the values and principles of feminism.
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Ageing studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that was developed by scholars from many different disciplines. Over the past fifteen years the field of ageing studies has flourished, with a growing number of scholars paying attention to the cultural implications of population ageing.
Teckyoung Kwon is a literary critic, translator and professor in English literature at the School of English, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, ecology, American and British fiction, narrative theory, neuro-humanities, Korean literature and Dao.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is an Indian feminist scholar, a professor in English, and author of several books on issues related to feminism and gender. Her research interest has covered many subjects such as of the pre and post colonial period, Indian English writing, gender and cultural issues related to South Asia, and the English literature of the Victorian era. She has also edited a series called the "Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism", and "Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India". She has authored many books of which the notable ones are the Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India and Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism.
Gina Dent is an associate professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. She co authored the 2022 book Abolition. Feminism. Now. with her partner, Angela Davis; Erica Meiners; and Beth Richie.
Joy Damousi, is an Australian historian and Professor and Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She was Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne for most of her career, and retains a fractional appointment. She was the President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 2017 to 2020.
Robert Deam Tobin was the Henry J Leir Chair in Literature, Language and Culture at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts from 2008 to 2022. He was a leading scholar of German and European literature, culture, and sexuality studies. Tobin died of cancer in August 2022.
