Catharine Stimpson is a University Professsor at New York University. Currently the editor of a book series for the University of Chicago Press, she was the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her many other publications include a novel, Class Notes; a selection of essays, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces; and a book on Gertrude Stein, which is under contract to the University of Chicago Press. In addition, more than 150 of her monographs, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in Transatlantic Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, and other publications.
Dean Stimpson is the Chair of the National Advisory Committee of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and past president of the Association of Graduate Schools. She is former chair of the New York State Humanities Council, the Ms. Magazine Board of Scholars, and the National Council for Research on Women, as well as past president of the Modern Language Association. She serves on the boards of other educational and cultural organizations, and from 1994-2000, was on the board of PBS.
She has been awarded both Fulbright and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships, as well as grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Before coming to NYU, Dean Stimpson was Director of the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program and University Professor at Rutgers, where she was also Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for graduate education. She was the first Director of the Women’s Center of Barnard College and of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers.
Dean Stimpson holds an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College, and a B.A. from Cambridge University. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, and holds numerous honorary degrees.