Women's Studies Affiliate Faculty
Barbara BabcockPh.D., Regents Professor, English/Comparative, Cultural and Literary Studies
Dr. Babcock is Professor of English and past Director of the Program in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies. She has also taught at the University of Texas and Brown University, where she was Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Trained in both comparative literature and anthropology at the University of Chicago, Professor Babcock has published widely in folklore, symbolic anthropology, literary criticism, and feminist studies. In addition to critical and feminist theory, her principle research interests are modes of reflexivity and inversion, ethnoaesthetics and folk art (in particular the art and experience of Pueblo potter Helen Cordero), and the work of women anthropologists in the Native American Southwest. Her publications include The Reversible World: Essays in Symbolic Inversion (1978), Signs about Signs: The Semeiotics of Self-Reference (1980), The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition (1986), and Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, 1880-1980 (1988), Inventing the Southwest (1990), and Pueblo Mothers and Children: Essays by Elsie Clews Parsons, 1915-1924 (1991).