Mary Dietz | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mary Golden Dietz c. 1951 (age 74–75) |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | Mount Holyoke College,University of California, Berkeley |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | American philosophy |
| Institutions | Northwestern University |
| Main interests | Political philosophy,feminist theory,history of philosophy |
Mary Golden Dietz (bornc. 1951) is the John Evans Emerita Professor of Political Theory atNorthwestern University.[1] She holds a joint appointment in Northwestern's Department of Political Science and its Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She is the author of many books and articles infeminist theory and thehistory of philosophy and her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, Turkish, and Japanese. She edited the journalPolitical Theory from 2005 to 2012. Prior to joining the faculty at Northwestern in 2007, she taught at theUniversity of Minnesota.[2] She announced her retirement in 2022, after which Northwestern named her Professor Emerita.
Dietz graduatedMagna Cum Laude fromMount Holyoke College in 1972 with a degree in political science.[3] She did her master's and doctoral work at theUniversity of California, Berkeley during the era of theBerkeley School of political theory when political theoristsHanna Pitkin,Michael Rogin, and Norman Jacobson were all working at Berkeley.[4] While there she developed an interest in the work ofHannah Arendt through graduate seminars with Pitkin.[2] She obtained her PhD in 1982.[3] Her dissertation project was a critical reconstruction and interpretation of the political thought of the French mysticSimone Weil, who she encountered in theNew York Review of Books referenced as "the 'other' most famous 'female philosopher' of the twentieth century."[2] This research became her first bookBetween the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil (1988).[5] Dietz's study of Weil was one of the first works dealing explicitly with the political aspects of Weil's thinking, and is also noted for her use ofpsychoanalysis and her incorporation offeminist theory into Weil studies.[6]