Janet R. Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served fifteen years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and she has also served as Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development.
As Director of BCRW, Professor Jakobsen founded the webjournal, Scholar & Feminist Online (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publication-sections/sf-online/) along with the New Feminist Solutions (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/publication-sections/nfs/) series of activist research projects with community-based organizations, such as Queers for Economic Justice and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Professor 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.
She 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, D.C.