Research Interests: 20th and 21st century French and Francophone Literature; Feminist Theory; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Culture, Arts, and Politics

Alice Jardine is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) and of Studies of Women, Gender & Sexuality (WGS) at Harvard University, where she co-founded and helped to develop and lead WGS. Her teaching in RLL focuses on 20th- and 21st-century French/Francophone literature, poststructuralist and feminist theory. In WGS, her courses range from the history of US feminism to media theory. Her four-decade-long teaching career has been instrumental in providing generations of students with a toolbox of insights––cultural, political, societal, poetic––to critically and dynamically engage with a fast and ever-changing world. Other institutional initiatives include her co-founding, in 1993, the Boston Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality and her serving, since 2010, as Director of the Harvard Summer School Study Abroad Program in Paris. 

Jardine’s legacy of scholarship has been at the forefront of critical thought since the early 1980s. Her Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), co-translation of Kristeva’s Desire in Language (1980), and several co-edited volumes (e.g. The Future of Difference, Men in Feminism, Shifting Scenes, Living Attention) reflect her deep investment in understanding how issues of women, gender, and sexuality are integral to the analysis of politics, culture, and society. Her most recent book, At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2020. Three new book projects address critical issues in contemporary interdisciplinary debates. One is an auto-theoretical reflection on intellectual life in 1970’s Paris (Picaresque Paris: Bringing Theory Back to Life). The second, Visions of Catastrophe: The 21st Century 1950's Style, takes on the urgent ethical challenges facing the world due to climate chaos and the increasing dominance of technology over life itself. The third, BOOMING, is a fictional account of the U.S. baby boomer's relationship––and responsibility for––the world of catastrophe that was launched in 1950's America.

Audio Tapes:

jai_fait_harvard.a_paris_1_5.mp3; jai_fait_harvard.a_paris_2_5.mp3; jai_fait_harvard.a_paris_3_5.mp3; jai_fait_harvard.a_paris_4_5.mp3; jai_fait_harvard._au_palais_de_tokyo_5_5.mp3

Books:

The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G.K. Hall and Company, 1980; paperback, Rutgers University Press, 1985). Cited in the Harvard Guide to Influential Books.Gynésis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, paperback, 1986.) Several chapters of Gynesis have been reprinted separately; for example, "The Demise of Experience: Fiction as Stranger Than Truth," in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Gynésis: Configurations de la femme et de la modernité, translated by Patricia Baudoin, with the author (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991). Gynesis, translated into Japanese, with the author and with a new introduction. Tokyo, Japan.Men in Feminism , eds. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London: Methuen, 1987); second edition, 1988.Social Control and the Arts, eds. Susan Suleiman, Alice Jardine, Ruth Perry and Carla Mazzio (Cambridge: New Cambridge Press, 1990).Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France, eds. Alice Jardine and Anne Menke. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Paperback edition, 1993.Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan, eds. Alice Jardine, Shannon Lundeen and Kelly Oliver, with an introduction by Alice Jardine. (New York: SUNY Press, 2007).

Booming: An Apocalyptic Memoir --a novel in manuscript under revision.

In Progress: Mothers Writing: Collected Essays

In Progress: Visions of Catastrophe: The 21st Century 1950s Style
 

Translation:

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

"Coding the Human in a Transmodern World: A Millennial Conversation With Alice Jardine" and "An Excerpt from Booming" FACS, volume 6, Spring 2003.

Review of Nancy Miller's But Enough About Me. In The Radcliffe Quarterly, Spring 2003.

"The Invisible Woman In the Academy: Or, Murder Still Without A Text." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Volume 24, Number 2, Fall 2005.

"The Game Show," an excerpt from Booming: An Apocalyptic Memoir. Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 33, Nos. 3&4, Fall/Winter 2005.

"Thinking Wittig's Differences: Or, failing that, Invent," GLQ, vol 13, no 4, 2007.