Mary Jacobus

Professor Emerita

Overview

Mary Jacobus was a Fellow of ady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, from 1971 to 1980. In 1980 she moved to Cornell University, where she held the John Wendell Anderson Chair of English and Women¹s Studies. In 2000 she returned to the UK as Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, where she was also a Professorial Fellow of Churchill College. From 2006 until her retirement, she was Director of Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). In 2011-12, she returned to Cornell as M. H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the AHRC, and is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She served on the Academic Committee of Norway's Holberg International Memorial Prize 2009-2015. She has written widely on Romanticism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, as well as visual culture; her most recent books include The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of KleinRomantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016), and On Belonging and Not Belonging: Translation, Migration, Displacement (2022). She is  currently working on a book on forests.

Research Focus

  • Women’s studies
  • Romanticism
  • Feminist criticism and theory
  • Continental and British psychoanalysis