Caren Kaplan papers (MS.2022.007)

Biographical/Historical Note

Caren Kaplan provided the following first-person biographical note that is included here in italics. The original statement is located in the "Annotated index to contents" found in box 1 folder 1 of the collection.

I was born in 1955 in Ithaca, NY. My father, Arthur Kaplan, was completing his PhD in Psychology at Cornell University. My mother, Doris Flax Kaplan, was a home economist and nutritionist. After a short stint in St. Louis, Missouri, we moved to Bangor, Maine, where my father ran the first community mental health services and then a few miles down the road to Orono, Maine, when my father took a position as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Maine (his alma mater). My mother got an MA in library science and worked at the university library in the reference department. I lived with my parents and younger brother in Orono, on the ancestral land of the Penobscot Wabanaki people, until I left for college in Massachusetts.

We were among the few Jewish families in our town and experienced casual as well as organized anti-Semitism. My parents were progressive liberals and belonged to the local chapter of the NAACP in the 1960s. My mother took us to anti-war rallies on campus. Family friends included many international faculty, and we regularly visited family in New York. When I was in high school I was very serious about studying dance and art. Feminism was in the air. I attended a talk by Robin Morgan on the UM campus when she was on the circuit after the publication of Sisterhood is Powerful and founded a feminist "support group" in my high school. I subscribed to Ms. magazine and bought the first newsprint edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves (the subject of avid discussion in our high school support group). I was a classic "second wave" feminist until I reached college and graduate school and began to absorb critiques of the white and US exceptionalism of some parts of that movement. Summer jobs as a "downstairs" maid on coastal estates and as a waitress informed my class analysis through direct experience. I was fortunate to participate in the American Field Service (AFS) summer program in between junior and senior year in high school and I was assigned to live with a family in Istanbul, Turkey. This was a transformative experience—the first time I had traveled outside of the United States and the first time I had lived in a city. My parents were the children of immigrants from eastern Europe and the first members of their families to attend university and they instilled in me a deep respect for learning and for public education. Although I attended a private college myself (probably thanks to my mother's advocacy), public education could have been said to be our family's true "religion" and my father was markedly disappointed when I accepted my first job at Georgetown University. I had let him down. Fortunately, I redeemed myself when I moved to the University of California system.

After completing her PhD in the History of Consciousness program at University of California, Santa Cruz, Caren Kaplan began her career in the English Department at Georgetown University. She continued in the Women's Studies Department at University of California, Berkeley before moving to University of California, Davis in 2004. She retired from UC Davis in 2019 as Professor of American Studies and affiliated faculty in Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies.

Kaplan has been a leading scholar of Transnational feminism, Postcolonial theory, and Militarization Studies. She is the author and editor of six books and numerous highly influential essays and articles. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Arabic. In addition to American Studies, Kaplan has been affiliated with Women and Gender Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Cinema and Technocultural Studies, the DE's in Feminist Theory & Research, Critical Theory, Performance Studies, and Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition. She also served for two terms as Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group.