Joan WALLACH SCOTT

American historian, Joan Wallach Scott is both an internationally renowned scientist and a leading figure in feminist thought in the United States.

After teaching at several American universities, including the University of Illinois Chicago, the University of North Carolina, and Brown University, Joan Wallach Scott was elected to the position of Professor of Social Sciences at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in 1985, a post she held until her retirement in 2014.

Joan Wallach Scott is considered one of the leading American historians for her knowledge of nineteenth-century France. Her work includes the study of the glassmaking trade, women's work, women's access to citizenship, the wearing of the veil, and what she calls 'French feminism'. Although the wake of social history can be considered the starting point of her work, she advocates for a critical approach to history. She has thus contributed to the deconstruction of the classical categories of history by introducing gender both as a constitutive element of social relations and as a useful category of historical analysis.

Feminist historian and critic, Joan Scott is a committed intellectual. Her struggle is two-fold, in that it is epistemological, aiming to liberate the social sciences from the grip of orthodoxy and place gender at the heart of scientific research, and institutional, striving to introduce women's studies into university curricula and public debate. For all these reasons, Joan Wallach Scott is an 'unclassifiable historian' and her research is characterised by a fruitful interdisciplinary approach.

Joan Wallach Scott has received several prestigious awards, including the 2009 Award for Scholarly Distinction from the American Historical Association and the 2016 Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, the French government awarded her the title of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.

In awarding Joan Wallach Scott an honorary doctorate, the Faculty of Social Sciences wishes to honour a researcher whose pioneering work has significantly influenced not only the historical discipline and critical theory in the social sciences but also gender studies and feminist thought.