Background

Janet Jakobsen was born in the United States.

Education

Janet holds a Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College, a Master of Arts from Claremont School of Theology, and a Doctor of Philosophy (1992) from Emory University.

Career

While completing her education, Janet R. Jakobsen was for a time an associate professor of women's studies at the University of Arizona.

She served fifteen years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), an organization that for thirty years has provided a venue for the discussion of issues facing women nationally and globally. Lectures, seminars, and similar programming are the forums most frequently promoted by the Barnard Center. She also served as a Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development at Barnard College.

As Director of BCRW, Jakobsen founded the web journal, Scholar & Feminist Online, along with the New Feminist Solutions series of activist research projects with community-based organizations, such as Queers for Economic Justice and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

In 1998 Indiana University Press published Jakobsen's Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics. Her first book received positive critical reviews and provided a new approach of interest to students of ethics, women's studies, and political theory.

She taught as a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University and Harvard University.

Jakobsen is the author of The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics and Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics. With Ann Pellegrini, she is co-author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance and co-editor of Secularisms. With Elizabeth Castelli she is co-editor of Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence.

Currently, Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor and Chair of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Achievements

• Janet Jakobsen is a noted feminist and academic as well as an accomplished author, having published a variety of journal articles and book chapters. For her works, Janet received the President's Award for Academic Excellence from the School of Theology at Claremont.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics

    (Employing historical case studies of how alliances work a...)

    1998
  • Secularisms

    (At a time when secularism is put forward as the answer to...)

    2008
  • Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

    (In this powerful and timely book, Janet R. Jakobsen and A...)

    2003
  • The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics 2020
  • Interventions: Activists And Academics Respond To Violence 2004

Views

Janet's research interests include religion, gender, and sexuality in American public life; social movements and feminist alliance politics; feminist and queer ethics; and global issues of economics and violence.

Connections

Janet's partner is Christina Crosby, a scholar, and writer.

Partner:

Christina Crosby