Joan Wallach Scott
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Joan Wallach Scott is an American historian of France with contributions in gender history and intellectual history. She is currently the Harold F. Linder Professor at the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
Among her most notable publications was the article "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," published in 1986 in the American Historical Review. It was germinal in the formation of a field of gender history within the Anglo-American historical profession.
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[edit] Life
Joan Scott graduated from Brandeis in 1962 and received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1969.
Before coming to the Institute for Advanced Study, Scott taught across disciplines and in various departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Rutgers University, the Johns Hopkins University. At Brown University she was founding director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, and the Nancy Duke Lewis University Professor and professor of history.
Scott has also played a major role in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as the chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
[edit] Work
Scott's work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history. Drawing on a range of philosophical thought, as well as on a rethinking of her own training as a labor historian, she has contributed to a transformation of the field of intellectual history
In addition to her article cited above, Scott has published several books, which are widely reprinted and have been translated into several languages, including French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean. Her publications include The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth Century City (Harvard University Press, 1974); Women, Work and Family (coauthored with Louise Tilly) (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978); Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1988); Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Harvard University Press, 1996); and Parité: Sexual Difference and the Crisis of French Universalism (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Scott has also edited numerous other books and published countless articles.
Her recent work focuses on the vexed relationship of the particularity of gender to the universalizing force of democratic politics. Her current book examines the recent controversy in France over the wearing of Islamic headscarves in public schools.
[edit] Awards and honors
She has received various awards, accolades, and honorary degrees for her work, including the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, the Hans Sigrist Award for Outstanding Research in Gender Studies, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[edit] Family
Her son A. O. Scott is a film critic for the New York Times.
