Alice Jardine

Jardine grew up in Dayton, Ohio, attending public schools there until she left for college in 1969. She received her B.A. from Ohio State University (1973); her M.A. in French (1977) and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (1982) from Columbia University.[4] In 1973, while on a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at the Lycée Hélène Boucher in Paris, she knocked on Simone de Beauvoir’s door and introduced herself, commencing a years-long conversation with the famous feminist philosopher and activist.[5] Selected by the French Department at Columbia in 1975 to be an exchange student in Paris, Jardine was the first woman in modern times to study at the École normale supérieure-rue d'Ulm (1979–80), where she was also reportedly the first woman to live in Samuel Beckett’s former dorm room.[6][5]

In 1982, Jardine was appointed to Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, advancing to Associate Professor in 1985 and full Professor in 1989. During this time, when relatively few women were appointed to the status of full tenured faculty, Jardine helped found the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies concentration as well as the Boston Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies.[6] Despite limited support from the Harvard administration, she prevailed and women's studies at Harvard has grown exponentially since its early days. The program was renamed Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in 2003.[7] In addition to mentoring, advising, and administrating, Jardine has been a key voice in advocating both nationally and internationally for the academic legitimacy of the field, dismantling broad administrative misconceptions about the field as simply a “polemical” discipline, or as a women's or affirmative action center.[8]

In the 1980s, Jardine was best known as a key figure in the ongoing global debates about feminism and its stakes in the contemporary era. Her earliest work participated in the study of what has been called “new French feminisms.” Her well-known 1985 book, Gynesis, worked to complexify and challenge the idea of “woman” as a catch-all metaphor for everything that escapes and defies Western monological thought.[9]

Jardine's intellectual trajectory and contribution to the formation of this knowledge owes much to the fact of having crossed paths or even worked alongside numerous 20th and 21st-century philosophers and thinkers. One such formative figure was Simone de Beauvoir, whom Jardine met just in 1973.[5] Another major influence on Jardine's intellectual commitment to the stakes of feminism is the philosopher and writer Julia Kristeva, for whom Jardine served as research assistant while a graduate student at Columbia University in 1976.[10] Alongside Leon Roudiez and Thomas Gora, Jardine played a prominent role in the translation of Kristeva's work into English during the 1980s, and, as of 2020, is the first person to write her complete biography.[11]