Joan Wallach Scott
Harold F. Linder
Professor
School of Social
Science

Joan Scott 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 ground-breaking 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. 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).

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1969; Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, 1970-72; Assistant Professor, Northwestern University, 1972-74; Associate Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1974-77, Professor, 1977-80; Nancy Duke Lewis University Professor and Professor of History, Brown University, 1980-85; Institute for Advanced Study, Member, 1978-79, Professor, 1985-, Harold F. Linder Professor, 2000-; Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, American Historical Association (AHA), 1974; Joan Kelly Prize, AHA, 1989; Hans Sigrist Prize, University of Bern, Switzerland, 1999.