Janet Jakobsen
Department
American Studies, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies
Contact
Janet R. Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served for 15 years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) where she founded the webjournal Scholar & Feminist Online, the first online-only peer reviewed feminist journal, along with the New Feminist Solutions series of activist research projects with community-based organizations, such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Queers for Economic Justice, the New York Women's Foundation, and A Better Balance: Work and Family Legal Center. This work was supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Overbrook Foundation.
Jakobsen is the author of The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Scholarship) and Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics. She is also dedicated to collaborative projects as crucial to feminist research. With Ann Pellegrini she co-wrote Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance and co-edited Secularisms. With Elizabeth Castelli she co-edited Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence. With Elizabeth Bernstein, she served as Co-Principal Investigator for the Gender Justice and Neoliberal Transformations Working Group, a collaboration among 12 scholars working transnationally, which produced the co-authored book, Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Gender, Sex, and Possibilities for Justice. She is pursuing a new research project in the environmental humanities with the working title, "InHabitation: Forests, Farms, Houses, and Wild Modes of Living."
Jakobsen has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Udall Center for Public Policy at the University of Arizona, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. She has taught as a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University and Harvard University. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, DC.
- Ph.D., Emory University, Ethics and Society, Graduate Division of Religion
- M.A., School of Theology at Claremont
- A.B. Dartmouth College, Highest Distinction in Philosophy and Distinction in Economics
- Ethics
- Activism
- Religion and Politics
- Responding to Violence
- Environmental Humanities
- Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory
- Theorizing Activism
- Modes of Living
- Introduction to Environmental Humanities
- Environmental Humanities in Action
- Religion and Environmental Ethics (in development)
- Religion, Gender, and Violence
- Senior Seminar (capstone)
- Visiting Professor, Sexualities Project at Northwestern, Northwestern University, 2023
- Alice Paul Center Diversity Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
- Visiting Professor, Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Harvard University, 2008
- Greater Philadelphia Women’s Studies Consortium Scholar-in-Residence, 2006
- Visiting Associate Professor, Ethics in Society Project, Wesleyan University, 2004
- Fellow, Center for the Study of Values and Public Life, Harvard Divinity School, 1998-99
- Senior Research Fellow, Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, 1996-97
- Fellow, Udall Center for Public Policy, University of Arizona, 1995
- American Fellowship, American Association of University Women, 1991-92
Selected Publications
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Gender, Sex, and Possibilities for Justice with Elizabeth Bernstein, et. al. (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2022; Spanish edition, Centro de Investicagiones y Estudios de Género, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2025)
The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (New York University Press, 2020)
Secularisms, edited with A. Pellegrini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, with A. Pellegrini (New York: New York University Press, 2003; Boston: Beacon Press, 2004, paperback edition)
Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence, edited with E. Castelli (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004)
Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)
"Gender and Violence: Why is Gender-Based Violence So Persistent?" The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, ed. Andrew Murphy. New York: Blackwell's, Forthcoming.
"The Secular Paradox as Site of Possibility," Symposium on Joseph Blankholm's The Secular Paradox, Critical Research on Religion, 13.1 (April 2025): 106-111.
"Activist Scholarship, Or Why Method Matters for Justice," The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Studies in Religion, ed. Melissa Wilcox. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2025, 145-64.
"Social Fabric or Glitter Bombs? Questions on Queer and Trans Studies in Religion," QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion 1.1 (Spring 2024): 53-76.
"Because Religion: Does Something Called 'Religion' Cause Gender-Based Violence?" The Cunning of Gender Violence, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023, 151-76.
"Disability, Debility, and Caring Queerly," with Christina Crosby, Social Text, Special Issue, "Left of Queer," ed. by David L. Eng and Jasbir Puar, 38.4 (145) (December 2020): 77-103.
- Co-Investigator, “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence,” Luce Foundation, 2015-20
- Principal Investigator, “Activist Research,” Overbrook Foundation, 2015
- Co-Investigator, “Urbanisms, Social Justice and the Liberal Arts,” Mellon Foundation, 2013
- Principal Investigator, “Alternative Genealogies of Modernity,” Mellon Foundation, 2010-12
- Principal Investigator, “Religion, Freedom, and the Politics of Identity,” Difficult Dialogues Initiative, Ford Foundation, 2006-2008; Renewed 2008-10
- Co-Investigator, “Religion, Politics, and Gender Equality: United States Country Study,” UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), 2007-09
- Principal Investigator, “Fashioning Citizenship: Gender and Immigration,” Carnegie Corporation, 2007-08
- Principal Investigator, “Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice,” Ford Foundation, 2007-09
- Principal Investigator, “Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice,” Overbrook Foundation, 2007
In The News
Reflecting on her time at Barnard, the senior said she was drawn to the College for the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program — “one of the best in the country.”
Professor Janet Jakobsen discusses how her latest book, The Sex Obsession, offers an expansive approach to reimagining the discourses of American politics through gender, sexuality, and religion.