Dr. Jane Desmond

Dr. Jane Desmond is Professor of Anthropology and Gender/Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, where she also directs the International Forum for U.S. Studies: A Center for the Transnational Study of the United States.

Having worked professionally in a number of fields across the arts and humanities, she has spent a career exploring the boundaries of disciplines and scholarly debates, especially those that cross national boundaries. Her current work crosses the species barrier to explore the potential power of the more-than-human turn in the “post-humanities”.  She is committed to recognizing both the power and limitations of culturally specific frameworks of interpretation, and to incorporating that multi-spectival awareness into every dimension of the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Formerly on the faculties of Duke, Cornell, and the University of Iowa, she has also taught in Hungary, China, and Italy, and published widely in several countries. In spring 2022 she will begin a Fulbright Scholar appointment in Germany. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, is past President of the International American Studies Association, and also works as a public intellectual, publishing in U.S. national news outlets like CNN.com, Newsweek, and Scientific American.