• Susan E. and William P. Stiritz Distinguished Professor, Women and Gender Studies

Linda Nicholson

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• B.A. in Philosophy at University of Pennsylvania
• M.A. in History of Ideas at Brandeis University
• Ph.D. in History of Ideas at Brandeis University

Nicholson first became interested in feminism in the late 1960s, but it wasn't until 1975 that she became fully immersed in feminism as an area of academic research. She earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, and a master's and a doctorate in the history of ideas program at Brandeis University.

After Brandeis, Nicholson taught for a year at the University of Lancaster in northern England. She then returned to the United States to teach at SUNY-Albany.

She received a residential fellowship at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard University's Divinity School in 1998. The previous year she received the Bread and Roses Award from the University of Albany for outstanding service on behalf of women. She was National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Scholar in June 1992 at the State University of New York, Potsdam, and the previous year she received a Rockefeller Foundation Humanist in Residence Fellowship at the Center for Research on Women at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Her first book was Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. In it, Nicholson argues that in the history of Western political philosophy, there had been a significant problem: Some of the major contributors to that history had not recognized that the relationship between private and public life was a historically changing relationship.

They took the existing form of that relationship, the form found in their own societies, and assumed it was natural.

Also while at Albany, Nicholson developed and edited the 32-volume series Thinking Gender, which is often credited with shaping the emerging discipline feminism as a political philosophy. In her career, she has written two books and more than 70 articles and reviews.