About the Contributors
Leila Ahmed is the Victor S. Thomas Professor at the
Harvard Divinity School. Before that, she was the first person to hold
the Women's Studies in Religion professorship, established in 1999. She
has also taught women's studies and Near Eastern studies at the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where at different times, she
directed both the women's studies program and the Near Eastern studies
programs. She received her undergraduate and graduate education at
Cambridge University, working first on British ideas of the Middle East.
Her next project was an ambitious and subtle history of women and gender
in the Muslim world, a text that changed the field of Middle East
women's studies. Her first two books, reflecting this work, were
Edward William Lane: A Study of His Life and Work and of British
Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century and Women and Gender
in Islam: The Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. She has also
published many well known articles, among them "Arab Culture and Writing
Women's Bodies" and "Between Two Worlds: The Formation of a Turn of the
Century Egyptian Feminist." Her current research and writing centers on
Islam in America and issues of women and gender. Border
Passage, a memoir of her journey from Cairo to the U.S. was
published in 1999.
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Mary Ann Caws was born and grew up in Wilmington,
North Carolina. She attended the National Cathedral School, and went on
to get her B.A. at Bryn Mawr in 1954, her M.A. at Yale University
(1956), and her doctorate from the University of Kansas in 1962; she holds
an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Union College (1983). She is
currently Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative
Literature at the Graduate School of the City of New York, and on the
faculty of the Women's Studies and Film Certificate Programs. Professor
Caws was co-Director of the Henri Peyre French Institute from
1980 to 2002. She is an Officer of the Palmes Académiques
(awarded by the French Minister of Education) and a Trustee of the
French Institute of Washington. Acclaimed as a scholar of surrealism
and of French twentieth century literature, she has published numerous
books and essays, most recently Marcel Proust (2003), The Yale
Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry (2004), Surrealism:
Themes and Movements (2004), a memoir, To the Boathouse
(2004), and Pablo Picasso (2005).
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Ann Douglas is Parr Professor of Comparative Literature. Before
Columbia, Professor Douglas taught at Princeton from 1970-74 - the first
woman to teach in its English Department. She received a Bicentennial
Preceptorship from Princeton for distinguished teaching in 1974, and a
fellowship from the National Humanities Center in 1978-79 after
publishing The Feminization of American Culture (1977). She
received an NEH and Guggenheim fellowship for 1993-94. Her study
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's (Farrar,
Straus, 1995) received, among other honors, the Alfred Beveridge Award
from the American Historical Association, the Lionel Trilling Award from
Columbia University, and the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from
the Organization of American Historians. She has published numerous
essays, articles and book reviews on American culture in papers and
periodicals such as The New York Times, The Nation and
Slate, and introductions for Little Women, Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Charlotte Temple, Minor Characters, The
Subterraneans, Studs Longian, and Word Virus: The William
S. Burroughs Reader. Prof. Douglas teaches twentieth-century
American literature, film, music, and politics, with an emphasis on the
Cold War era, African-American culture, and post-colonial approaches.
She is currently at work on a book, Noir Nation: Cold War U.S.
Culture 1945-1960. In Spring 2002, she was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences for her work in History.
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Joan Ferrante is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University. At Columbia since 1963, Professor Ferrante has also
taught at Swarthmore, Fordham, Tulane. She has received fellowships from
the American Council of Learned Societies and NEH and is a Fellow of the
Medieval Academy of America. She has served on the boards of
Speculum, Lectura Dantis Americana, and Dante
Studies; has served on Executive Councils of the Medieval Academy
and MLA, and as President of the Dante Society and the national Phi Beta
Kappa Society, and as President of the Medieval Academy. Her field is
medieval comparative literature, specializing in Dante, Provencal lyric,
medieval allegory and romance, and women in the Middle Ages. She has
published many articles and several books, including To the Glory of
Her Sex: Women's Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (1997),
The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (1984), The Lais of
Marie de France, a translation and commentary written with Robert
Hanning (1978), Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (1975),
Guillaume d'Orange, Four Twelfth Century Epics (1974), The
Conflict of Love and Honor: The Medieval Tristan Legend (1973). She
is currently working on a database on medieval women's letters, called
Epistolae, which is available online through the Columbia
Interactive.
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Susan Gubar, a Distinguished Professor of
English at Indiana University, co-authored The Madwoman in the
Attic (1979) as well as its three-volume sequel, No Man's Land:
The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988-94),
and co-edited the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985),
all with Sandra M. Gilbert. More recently, she has published
Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997),
Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000),
and Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew
(2003). In 2004, she edited the first annotated edition of Virginia
Woolf's A Room of One's Own to appear in the United States and in
2006 her Rooms of Our Own will be published by the University of
Illinois Press. She is currently collaborating with Sandra Gilbert on a
third edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and
on a Norton Reader of Feminist Criticism and Theory.
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Marrianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University. She joins Columbia from Dartmouth
College where she was the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor
in the Humanities. She is the Editor of PMLA. She has been a Guggenheim,
ACLS, National Humanities Center, Rockefeller Foundation, and Mary
Ingraham Bunting, Fellow. She served on the MLA Executive Council
(1992-95); the ACLA, Advisory Board (1993-97); the Board of Supervisors
of The English Institute (1997-2000); and the Executive Board of the
Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, (1998-2001). She has
recently published a number of essays and book chapters on cultural
memory and gender in twentieth and has twenty-first century culture,
particularly on the representation of World War Two and the Holocaust in
literature, testimony and photography. She is the author of Beyond
the Single Vision: Henry James, Michel Butor, Uwe Johnson (1981);
The Mother / Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism
(1989); and Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
(1997). She has edited or co-edited eight volumes: Feminist Readings:
French Texts/American Contexts, Special Issue of Yale French
Studies (1982); The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development
(1983); Conflicts in Feminism (1991); Ecritures de femmes:
Nouvelles cartographies (1996); The Familial Gaze (1999);
Time and the Literary: Essays from the 1999 English Institute
(2002); Gender and Cultural Memory (2002), a special issue of
Signs; and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust
(2004). She is currently writing a book with Leo Spitzer entitled
Ghosts of Home: Czernowitz and the Holocaust. For more information, visit Marianne Hirsch's
website.
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Jean Howard is William B. Ransford Professor and Vice Provost for
Diversity Initiatives at Columbia University. Professor Howard began
teaching at Syracuse in 1975, where she received the first
University-wide Wasserstrom Prize for excellence as teacher and mentor
of graduate students; she has also received Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon,
Folger and Newberry Library fellowships. In 2003-04 she was the Avery
Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.
Her teaching interests include Shakespeare, Tudor and Stuart drama,
Early Modern poetry, modern drama, feminist and Marxist theory, and the
history of feminism. She has published essays on Shakespeare, Pope,
Ford, Heywood, Dekker, Marston, and Jonson, as well as on aspects of
contemporary critical theory including new historicism, Marxism, and
issues in feminism. Her books include Shakespeare's Art of
Orchestration (1984); Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History
and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987); The Stage and
Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); with Phyllis Rackin,
Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English
Histories (1997); Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott
Shershow (2000); and four generically organized Companions to
Shakespeare, edited with Richard Dutton (2001). She is co-editor of
The Norton Shakespeare (1997) and General Editor of the Bedford
Contextual Editions of Shakespeare. Her current book project, entitled
Theater of a City: The Spaces of London Comedy 1598-1642, will be
published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in fall of 2006. From
1996 to 1999 Professor Howard served as Director of the Institute for
Research on Women and Gender and in
1999-2000 served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America.
In fall of 2004 Professor Howard began a three-year term as Vice Provost
for Diversity Initiatives at Columbia.
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Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca,
Malaysia, came to the United States as a Fulbright and Wein
International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and
American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. Her first collection
of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of
poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989);
Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her
work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Bill Moyers
featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words"
in 1999, and again on the program "Now" in February 2002. Her novel, Sister Swing,
was published by Marshall Cavendish Press in 2006. She is also
the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the
White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award
for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold was published by
the Feminist Press in 2001. Lim's co-edited anthology The Forbidden
Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology received the 1990
American Book Award. She has published two critical studies,
Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines
and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English:
Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many volumes and
special issues of journals, most recently, the special issue of Tulsa
Studies (2003) on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary
Imagination on Asian American literary criticism. She has served as
chair of Women's Studies, and is currently professor of English at the
University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Deborah E. McDowell
is the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies
at the University of Virginia. A member of the faculty since 1987, she
has written widely for both academic and general audiences. Her
publications include 'The Changing Same': Studies in Fiction by
African-American Women (1995), Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of
Kin (1997), as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and
scholarly editions, most recently Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass (1999). Extensively involved in editorial projects
pertaining to the subject of African-American literature, she founded
the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon Press and served as
its editor from 1985-1993, overseeing the re-publication of fourteen
novels from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She also
served as a period editor for the Norton Anthology of
African-American Literature (1997), contributing editor to the D. C.
Heath Anthology of American literature, and co-editor with Arnold
Rampersad of Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1988).
Professor McDowell has been the recipient of various grants, including
the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship (Radcliffe), the National Research
Council Fellowship of the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson
International Center Fellowship. She was elected to the Raven Society
of the University of Virginia in 1998. Professor McDowell is active in
the Charlottesville community and currently serves on the board of
Literacy Volunteers of America, the Arts Council of PVCC, and is a
reader for the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic.
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Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. That title
represents the end point of an academic journey from the French
department at Columbia to Women's Studies at Barnard to English at
Lehman College and the Graduate Center, and since 1999, English and
Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center. The subjects of her books
follow that trajectory from The Heroine's Text: Readings in the
French and English Novel, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist
Writing, and the edited Poetics of Gender, to her most recent
books, But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives, and
the co-edited collection, Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and
Community. The memoir "Out of Breath" is the prequel to all of the
above.
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Charlotte Pierce-Baker is a native
of Washington, D.C. She received her B.A. in English from Howard
University and the Master's degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences from
Ohio State University. In 1985 at Temple University, she was awarded
the Ph.D. in Speech Pathology and Applied Linguistics. Her Ph.D.
thesis, on black, inner-city children acquiring first language phonology,
was honored with a dissertation prize for "outstanding scholarship and
service in the university and community." Pierce-Baker has taught in
Los Angeles, California; New Haven, Connecticut; Edinburgh, Scotland;
Oxford, England; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; and
Wilmington, Delaware. Since 1998, she has been on faculty at Duke
University; in 2004 she was promoted to Research Professor in Women's
Studies and English at Duke. In July 2006 she will accept a position at
Vanderbilt University as Professor of Women's and Gender Studies with a
secondary position as Professor of English. Dr. Pierce-Baker has
published essays and commentary on literature and pedagogy in a variety
of periodicals. She has been an active volunteer with victim-survivor
services at Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR) in Philadelphia; she is
a participating member of Chicago's "Voices and Faces Project" on rape
and sexual assault. Pierce-Baker has been an active member of the
Women's Center at Duke University and liaison between the Duke Women's
Center and the Women's Studies Program. Since the publication of her
book, Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape (W.W.
Norton, September 1998), Pierce-Baker has continued to travel and
lecture on issues of black women and sexual assault and to teach courses
on women, violence, and trauma. For Pierce-Baker, finding and creating
a language is the first step to acknowledging and documenting the
"colonization of the body of woman." Surviving the Silence, the
first of its kind, provides us with the heretofore-muted voices of
African American women surviving the trauma of rape. Pierce-Baker's
book in progress, to be published by McGraw-Hill, is a family memoir of
living with a son with bipolar disorder. Dr. Pierce-Baker resides with
her husband, Houston Baker. They will be relocating to Nashville in
Fall 2006.
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Victoria Rosner is an associate professor of English at Texas A & M
University. She is the author of Modernism and the Architecture of
Private Life (Columbia U.P., 2005) and, with Nancy K. Miller, editor of
the Gender and Culture series that Miller and Carolyn Heilbrun
established at Columbia University Press. Rosner was a student in the
last graduate seminar Heilbrun taught before leaving Columbia and wrote
her M.A. thesis under Heilbrun's direction.
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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished
Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the late 1970s,
she has been working in feminist and queer studies, and is the author of
seven books including Between Men, Epistemology of the
Closet, Tendencies, Novell Gazing, Fat Art, Thin
Art (poetry), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity, and a memoir in haibun form, A Dialogue on
Love. She has also had exhibits of collage, textile, and book art at
RISD, Dartmouth, SUNY Stony Brook, and Johns Hopkins.
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon
Foundation Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Center
for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She
received her B.A. in English from Presidency College, Calcutta, 1959,
and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, 1967.
Her scholarship is in the fields of feminism, marxism, deconstruction,
globalization. Her books include Myself Must I Remake: The Life and
Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1974), Of Grammatology (translation
with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la
grammatologie, 1976), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural
Politics (1987), Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988),
The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues
(1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality
(1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Imaginary
Maps (translation with critical introduction of three stories by
Mahasweta Devi, 1994), The Spivak Reader (1995), Breast
Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by
Mahasweta Devi, 1997), Old Women (translation with critical
introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Imperatives to
Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten
(ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Song for Kali:
A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000),
Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical
introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, 2002), Death of a
Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), Red Thread
(forthcoming).
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Susan Winnett teaches in the Department of English and American
Studies at the Universität Hamburg. She is the author of
Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in Laclos, Goethe, and
James (Stanford 1993) and has recently completed Writing Back:
American Expatriates' Narratives of Return. She was Carolyn
Heilbrun's colleague in the Columbia English Department from 1985 to
1991.
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Margaret Vandenburg received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She
is Senior Lecturer in English at Barnard College, where she also serves
as Director of First Year English. In 2004, she was awarded the Emily
Gregory Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement both inside and
outside the classroom. She is also the author of the novel, An
American in Paris.
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