Jean Elisabeth Pedersen has been a member of the Eastman faculty since 1990. She received her BA cum laude with honors in history and a minor in economics from Barnard College, her MA and PhD in European history from the University of Chicago.
A recipient of multiple awards and honors, Pedersen has held three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities for participation in the NEH Summer Institute on the Idea of a Social Science (1998), NEH Summer Seminar on Nationalism (1996), and NEH Summer Institute on French Cultural Studies (1995). Other honors include a Bridging Fellowship to the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester (1999), a Monticello College Foundation Fellowship to the Newberry Library (1997); a Chicago Overseas Research Fellowship to France (1988); and a Chateaubriand French Government Fellowship to Paris (1996-1997). Before coming to Eastman, she taught as the Gustave von Holst Prize Lecturer for "French Feminism, 1789-1989" in the University of Chicago History Department (1990).
Pedersen's first book, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theatre, and Republican Politics 1870-1920, came out in 2003 from Rutgers University Press. Her first French article, a study of Marya Chéliga and the Théâtre féministe, just appeared in 2004 in the Bulletin de la Société de l`histoire de Paris et de l'Ile de France. Her numerous other publications in French intellectual and cultural history include essays in Teaching Durkheim (Oxford, 2005), French Cultural Studies (SUNY, 2000), and Domesticating the Empire (Virginia, 1998), and articles in Gender and History (2004), SIGNS: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2001), The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1998), and French Historical Studies (1996).
In addition to her position at Eastman, she holds an affiliate associate professorship in the history department of the University of Rochester.
