Dr. Janet R. Jakobsen is the Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College in New York.
“What we’re trying to do is create a world that is moving toward justice, perhaps a little faster than the arch of history that bends toward justice, and in so doing education is such a major tool,” says Jakobsen, whose courses include theorizing activism; knowledge, practice and power; and religion, gender and violence.
“I started teaching in 1992,” she continues. “Students have changed greatly over that time and continue to amaze me with their ideas, dedication, passion, and interests that make this a totally worthwhile undertaking. It makes you feel that whatever is happening politically, there is hope for the world.”
Jakobsen’s field is social ethics. She earned her doctorate in ethics and society in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her academic focus includes religion and politics, feminist theory, queer theory, ethics, activism, and public policy. She co-wrote the book Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance with Dr. Ann Pellegrini, a professor of performance studies and social and cultural analysis at New York University. She also authored Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics.
Jakobsen is again in a leadership position with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), serving as co-director. When she ended her 15 years as director of BCRW in 2015, the college devoted a day-long colloquium to celebrate her contributions to feminist scholarship and research. At that event, colleagues from early in her career in academia spoke about how when they were young faculty at University of Arizona, Jakobsen built a sense of queer community.
“One of the things about queer life, certainly among the generation I came up in…was the sense that you need friends to get through life,” says Jakobsen, who notes that the AIDS pandemic was at its height when she was in her 20s and 30s. AIDS organizations set up buddy systems. Those kinds of networks recurred during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when mutual aid groups sprang up.
“One of the things that I have learned — this is both in university administration and in community organizations and social movement work — let’s do our best to create an environment in which we can all be our best selves and in which we can find joy and happiness,” she says.
