About me

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, and Professor of English, and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke. Starting in January 2017, she will also be an adjunct Research Professor (“Forsker II”) at Norway’s National Library, for a period of five years. To learn more about Toril Moi’s academic work, click here.

Toril Moi grew up in the countryside in the south-west of Norway, and was educated at the University of Bergen. From 1979 to 1989 she lived mostly in Oxford, UK, and since 1989 she has been a resident of North Carolina.

As an academic, she writes on feminism, literary theory, ordinary language philosophy and literature. Her first book, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) has been translated into fifteen languages. Her 1994 book Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman has been translated into five languages, and a new 2nd edition was published in 2008. Her book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism won the MLA’s award for best book in comparative literary studies for 2007. Her most recent book on feminist theory is Sex, Gender and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman (2005). In May 2017, Chicago University Press will publish her ambitious new book on literary theory: Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell.

For more information about Toril Moi’s books, click here. For downloads of her writing in English, click here. For links to interviews and reviews, and other materials, click here.

In Norway, Toril Moi also writes widely for newspapers and magazines. For links to and downloads of her writing in Norwegian, click here.

To find out where Toril Moi will be speaking, click here.

 

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