Alice Jardine

Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) and of Studies of Women, Gender & Sexuality (WGS) at Harvard University, where she co-founded and helped to develop and lead WGS. Her teaching in RLL focuses on 20^th- and 21^st-century French/Francophone literature, poststructuralist and feminist theory. In WGS, her courses range from the history of US feminism to media theory. Her four-decade-long teaching career has been instrumental in providing generations of students with a toolbox of insights––cultural, political, societal, poetic––to critically and dynamically engage with a fast and ever-changing world. Other institutional initiatives include her co-founding, in 1993, the Boston Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality and her serving, since 2010, as Director of the Harvard Summer School Study Abroad Program in Paris.

Jardine’s legacy of scholarship has been at the forefront of critical thought since the early 1980s. Her Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), co-translation of Kristeva’s Desire in Language (1980), and several co-edited volumes (e.g. The Future of Difference, Men in Feminism, Shifting Scenes, Living Attention) reflect her deep investment in understanding how issues of women, gender, and sexuality are integral to the analysis of politics, culture, and society. Her most recent book, At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2020. Three new book projects address critical issues in contemporary interdisciplinary debates. One is an auto-theoretical reflection on intellectual life in 1970’s Paris (Picaresque Paris: Bringing Theory Back to Life). The second, Visions of Catastrophe: The 21st Century 1950's Style, takes on the urgent ethical challenges facing the world due to climate chaos and the increasing dominance of technology over life itself. The third, BOOMING, is a fictional account of the U.S. baby boomer's relationship––and responsibility for––the world of catastrophe that was launched in 1950's America.