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Katie Roiphe is the author of three non-fiction works, The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994), Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles (2007), and one novel, Still She Haunts Me (2002)—an empathetic imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson (known as Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She holds a Ph.D in English Literature from Princeton University, and is presently teaching at New York University. In addition, she regularly reviews books for Slate and The New York Times Book Review[1].

Her first book, The Morning After, was published while she was still a graduate student at Princeton. It argued that in many incidents of date rape, women are at least partly responsible for their actions. "One of the questions used to define rape was: 'Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman's 'judgment is impaired' and she has sex, it isn't always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape" [2].

In a 1995 interview, Camille Paglia described her as "the first intellectual of her generation" [3]. Ms. Paglia has since revised her opinion of Ms. Roiphe: "When Katie Roiphe came up in the mid-’90s, I thought she was going to be the intellectual of her generation, but she just withdrew after the huge flap about her first book, The Morning After. She drifted off into writing memoirs and talking about her personal life, and now has come back with some book on marriage. She didn't step up and that position is still vacant, so we now have absent two generations of young intellectuals in America" [4]".

Yet, many others have found Roiphe's more recent work superior to her first book. In Uncommon Arrangements she looks at prominent pairings from the London literary scene from 1910 to 1939 to examine our notions of affection and attraction, and the plausibility of monogamy. Reviewing for The New York Times, Tina Brown hailed it as a "perfect bedside book for an age like our own, when everything is known and nothing is understood" [5]. Salon's Rebecca Traister asked "has feminism's enfant terrible finally grown up?"—alluding to the less polemical, perhaps more mature, tack Roiphe had taken with the book to explore her favorite subject matter: sexual politics [6]. And, The New York Observer conceded Roiphe's success with the book. "Katie haters will be sorry to hear that it’s very absorbing," Alexandra Jacobs wrote, "she’s turned her attention to the past, specifically to the innards, the 'oily mechanism,' of seven unconventional literary marriages in Edwardian England. In doing so, she’s produced a tidy little piece of scholarship that’s definitely preferable to any smug sexual-politics punditry" [7].

In the spring of 2007, Roiphe was appointed as a professor in New York University's Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, within the school's department of Journalism. She grew up in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her mother is the noted feminist writer, Anne Roiphe, whose novels include Up the Sandbox and Lovingkindness.

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