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-Madison in 1969. Before coming to the Institute for Advanced Study, Scott taught in history 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. She serves on the editorial boards of Signs, differences and since January 2006, has been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern 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[citation needed] Her current work focuses on the vexed relationship of the particularity of gender to the universalizing force of democratic politics.
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); Parité: Sexual Difference and the Crisis of French Universalism (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and "The Politics of the Veil" (Princeton University Press, 2007). Scott has also edited numerous other books and published countless articles.
[edit] Awards and honors
She has received various awards, accolades, and honorary degrees for her work, including the American Historical Association's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, the Hans Sigrist Award for Outstanding Research in Gender Studies, and the Nancy Lyman Roekler Prize of the AHA for graduate mentorship. She holds honorary degrees from Brown University, SUNY Stony Brook, The University of Bergen (Norway) and Harvard University.
[edit] Students
Scott's influence within the Academy has been pervasive. She has played an influential role in establishing the careers of a number of prominent academics[citation needed]. Among the students who completed their dissertations under Scott's supervision are Leora Auslander at the University of Chicago, Mary Louise Roberts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dagmar Herzog at the City University of New York.
[edit] Family
Previously married to Donald Scott, a professor of American history at CUNY, she is the mother of A. O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times.
She is niece of actor Eli Wallach
