Women's and Gender Studies Program

Erica Harth to become Professor Emerita (May 2006)

On the occasion of her retirement from Brandeis, we celebrate the distinguished career of Erica Harth, Professor of Humanities and Women’s and Gender Studies and a founding member of our program.

When she came to Brandeis in 1975, Erica was one of three colleagues appointed as fellows for the Carnegie Corporation’s project on Women and Career Options. “The result - after some struggle!” she explains, “was the formation of our Women’s Studies Program.”  During those early days, Erica was part of the “comradely group that created the syllabus for WMNS 5a, which was at the time a cooperatively taught course. Much of the planning took place on Joyce Antler’s porch.”

Erica Harth has been a member of Women’s Studies ever since.  She has served on the Women’s Studies Advisory Board, chaired the curriculum committee, helped to create our graduate program, and served as coordinator of that program.  “One of my services of which I am most proud,” she comments, “is my participation in the search committee that brought our current director, Sue Lanser, to Brandeis.”

A specialist in early modern French literature who published three books and many essays on seventeenth-century France, Professor Harth became an expert in feminist theory and film studies as well.  She has offered courses ranging from “Women and Moralists in the Ancient Régime” to “Feminist Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies” to our graduate “Foundations of Gender.”  In 1993 she co-taught one of the earliest courses for the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies at Radcliffe College, “Boundaries of Domesticity in Early Modern Europe,” and this fall, she will be leading the Graduate Consortium’s dissertation workshop.

Professor Harth’s scholarship has also long reflected her interest in women and gender. During her year of teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, she sent in a "Report from Israel" on the nascent women’s movement there for the first issue of the journal Feminist Studies.  She has written for the Women’s Review of Books, where, she adds, “I have also twice had the pleasure of seeing my work reviewed.”   In preparation for her widely acclaimed book, Cartesian Women, published in 1992 by Cornell University Press, she spent a year as a Bunting Fellow at what is now the Radcliffe Institute.  In 2001 she edited an important volume of essays, Last Witnesses, reflecting on the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, of which she herself was a young witness.

“The best thing for me about the Brandeis Women’s Studies Program has been the wonderful colleagues, staff, and students, who have continued to form a vibrant, collegial community,” Erica concludes.  We ourselves know that Erica Harth has helped to create that vibrant community.  We look forward to her continued participation in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program after she formally leaves the university.