American historian Joan Wallach Scott is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her fields of expertise include French history and gender and feminist theories. A pioneer in challenging the methods and assumptions used in historical scholarship, Scott has been an important voice calling for the investigation and renovation of previously accepted scholarly methods and assumptions.

Although known for her authorship of a variety of books—(including Gender and the Politics of History (1988; 1999); Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996); Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005); and The Politics of the Veil (2007))—one would be remiss not to mention the 1988 publication of her highly influential article, “Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In that essay Scott interrogates mainstream theories of gender while simultaneously considering the utility of a gender-based analysis. What she offers the reader is a complex look at the assumptions at play in scholarly treatments of gender, many of which carry critical flaws. With an eye toward the power of discourse (a term referring to the myriad social structures that shape what gets to count as “knowledge”), Scott argues that gender is a discursive act based on notions of power and difference.