Joan Wallach Scott
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Joan Wallach Scott Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study |
Joan Wallach Scott is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is known internationally for writings that theorize gender as an analytic category. She is a leading figure in the emerging field of critical history. Her groundbreaking 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, and has contributed to a transformation of the field of intellectual history. Her work spans European Studies (both historical and contemporary), Islamic Studies (her current project deals with gender and modernity in the Islamic World), and Women's Studies, where she has been a voice for rigorous debates around the legacy of Western liberalism in often unexpected and surprising ways, work that has enriched both philosophical debates about liberal political theory as well as gender studies per se. Scott’s recent books focus on gender and democratic politics. They include Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), and Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005). She has received many honors, including the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize (1974) and Joan Kelly Prize (1989) of the American Historical Association, and the Hans Sigrist Prize from the University of Bern, Switzerland (1999). Scott was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008) and has received honorary degrees from Harvard Law School, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, University of Bergen (Norway), and Brown University.
Introduced by: John Savage, associate professor of history Department of History
Interviewed by: Nandini Deo, assistant professor of political science, Department of Political Science
