Dr. Sally L. Kitch
Founding Director of the Institute for Humanities Research
CLAS Humanities Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Sally L. Kitch is the founding Director of the Institute for Humanities Research and CLAS Humanities Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She came to ASU in 2006 from Ohio State University, where she served as Professor from 1992-2006, Department Chair of Women’s Studies from 1992-2000, and Vice Chair from 2004-2006.
Professor Kitch is a feminist cultural theorist, with specialities in feminist epistemology, theories of transdisciplinarity, and theories of gender representation in visual and narrative culture, with a focus on the material effects of such representation on the lived realities of diverse women’s lives. She is equally interested in the effects of cultural narratives in creating oppression and disadvantage and in alternative narratives of resistance to those effects. One key focus of her narrative-historical research has been the relationship between narratives of utopianism, gender, and feminsm. (She has been credited with creating utopianism/dystopianism as a sub-field of feminist theory.) Two books on gender and nineteenth-century American utopian community narratives have won national prizes: Chaste Liberation: Celibacy and Female Cultural Status (University of Illinois Press, 1989) and This Strange Society of Women: Reading the Letters and Lives of the Woman’s Commonwealth (Ohio State University Press, 1993). Her most recently published book on feminism and utopianism is Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2000). She has also published widely in the field of women and gender studies, with a focus on graduate women's studies/gender studies education and the transdisciplinary research mission of the field.
Gendered narratives of racial formation constitute the focus of her current book project, The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States, forthcoming in 2009 from SUNY Press. That book addresses theories of race and gender intersectionality by tracing the historical development of racial ideology in terms of gender ideology in U.S. narrative history. Her interest in the gendered foundations of race extends globally to the various ways in which gender roles, expectations, and prescribed behaviors, particularly for women, symbolize ethnic, religious, and national identities. Her collaborative Project for Afghan Women’s Leadership, in partnership with an Ohio State University colleague, explores the gendered foundations of Afghan national, regional, and ethnic identities. The project is designed to help Afghan women leaders identify their gender-based strategies for social transformation. A corollary of that project is the construction of transnational feminist theory that addresses the symbolic use of gender to further cultural and political aims that disadvantage women and marginalized men.
Professor Kitch holds interdisciplinary graduate degrees from the University of Chicago (M.A., University Fellow) and Emory University (PhD, University Fellow, Danforth Fellow), and she has a B.A. in English from Cornell University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa).