Feminist Theory Archives (Brown University)

Mary Ann Doane works in the areas of film theory, feminist film studies, cultural theory, semiotics, photography, television, and digital media. She is the Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Doane was previously the George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she taught for more than three decades, from 1979 until 2011. She has also held visiting positions at New York University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Chicago, and served on the Executive Board of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990.

Doane has served on many professional organizations and editorial boards, including the Executive Council for The Society for Cinema Studies, the Film Division of the Modern Language Association and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies . Her most recent work examines the use of close-ups in film practice and theory, and the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body’s relation to space in modernity.

(Biography modified from: http://fm.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/mary-ann-doane/)

From the guide to the Mary Ann Doane papers, Doane (Mary Ann) Papers, 1966-2009, (John Hay Library Special Collections)

Jessica Benjamin, born on January 17, 1946, is an American feminist psychoanalyst, teacher, and writer. In addition to running a private psychotherapeutic practice in New York City, she is a faculty member at NYU's Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

After earning her bachelor's degree cum laude at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1967, Benjamin traveled to Germany to pursue graduate work. She earned her MA in 1971 at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany, studying Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy at the Institute for Social Research. Returning to the States, she taught as a visiting professor of Sociology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. When Benjamin earned her PhD in Sociology from NYU in 1978, she became a fellow in the New York Institute for the Humanities. During this time she organized a conference called "The Second Sex, Thirty Years Later." Between 1980 and 1983, she conducted research on the social context of mother-infant interactions at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY, funded by a National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health.

A prolific writer, Benjamin has published articles and books on psychoanalysis and feminism, specifically analyzing the dynamics of human relationships. Her first book, published in 1988, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, offers a groundbreaking analysis of the power dynamics tied to masculinity and femininity. In her 1995 collection of essays Like Objects, Love Objects, Benjamin develops a psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity, which she elaborates further in her 1997 work Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis .

From the guide to the Jessica Benjamin Papers, Benjamin (Jessica) papers, 1972-2007, (bulk 1985-2000), (John Hay Library Special Collections)