Caren Kaplan

Who is Caren Kaplan?

Caren Kaplan is a professor of American Studies at University of California at Davis, and a prominent figure in the academic discipline of women's studies. Together with Inderpal Grewal, Kaplan is best known for her work as a founder of the field of transnational feminist cultural studies or transnational feminism. Kaplan is a proponent of the digital humanities and has turned the critical lens of cultural studies upon topics such as travel, visual culture, militarization and the construction of consumer subjects.

Kaplan received her Ph.D. in 1987 from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She wrote her dissertation, The Poetics of Displacement: Exile, Immigration, and Travel in Contemporary Autobiographical Writing, under the direction of James Clifford, Donna Haraway, and Teresa de Lauretis. Before accepting her position at UC Davis, Kaplan held teaching appointments at the University of California Berkeley and Georgetown University. In 2006-2007, she won the prestigious Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Kaplan was the founder of the Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender and Sexuality at UC Berkeley when she was a professor there and heavily influenced a new generation of scholars including such figures as Jasbir Puar.