Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. She is known for her English translation of Jacques Derrida's seminal work Of Grammatology, and her own philosophical writing…
Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge,…
Judith Butler is an American philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist whose work has profoundly shaped gender studies, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Born in Cleve…
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and…
Dr. Sigismund Freud, M.D. (University of Vienna)—later changed to Sigmund—was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human pe…
Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in bla…
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems …
American feminist Betty Naomi Friedan (née Bettye Naomi Goldstein) wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and cofounded the National Organization for Women in 1966. This book started the "second wave…
Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
Jürgen Habermas was a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, the top…
Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas), born 26 February 1958 (birth certificate) or 1956 on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French novelist. To admirers he is a wr…
Virginie Despentes is a French writer, novelist and filmmaker, born in Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle. Her most famous novel, and film of the same name is Baise-moi, a contemporary example of the exploitat…
Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th ce…
Martinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include The Miracle Weapons (1946) …
Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of E…
Ernest Ezra Mandel was a German born Belgian-Jewish Marxian economist and a Trotskyist activist and theorist. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium…
Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center, at Harvard University. He is one of the most important fi…
People consider that Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Николай Васильевич Гоголь) founded realism in Russian literature. His works include The Overcoat (1842) and Dead Souls (1842).
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Cyrillic: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and now ranks as one of the towering figures of Russian literature. His major works include the short…
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born in 1891 into an “Untouchable” family of modest means. One of India’s most radical thinkers, he transformed the social and political landscape in the struggle against Br…
Byung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attenti…
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had clo…
(Arabic Profile إدوارد سعيد) Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian A…
