Jane S. Jaquette is Emeritus Professor of Politics and of Diplomacy & World Affairs at Occidental College, where she continues to teach during the Spring term.
A specialist in international relations and Latin America, Dr. Jaquette did her undergraduate degree in Political Science at Swarthmore College (1964) and her Ph.D. in International Relations at Cornell University (1971), writing her dissertation on the politics of development in Peru. She began teaching at Occidental College in 1969 and, shifting her focus to women’s issues, edited a comparative anthology on women and politics (1974), while continuing to do research and publish articles on Peru. From 1979 to 1981 she worked as a policy analyst in the Women in Development (WID) Office at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington, DC. In 2014, she taught a class on democracy at the University of Melbourne.
At Occidental, Dr. Jaquette was actively involved in college governance, serving several terms on the tenure and promotions and curriculum committees and as chair of the Diplomacy and World Affairs department, the Politics department, and the College Core program. She received the outstanding junior and senior faculty awards at Occidental, and was named to the Bertha Harton Orr Chair in the Liberal Arts in 1996. In 2005, she gave up full time teaching to devote more time to research and writing. She continues to teach two courses a year on an adjunct basis.
Dr. Jaquette has edited seven books and published more than fifty articles on topics ranging from Peruvian politics to international feminism, with a special emphasis on women’s movements and democratization in Latin America. Her edited and co-edited books include The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to Democracy (1989); The Women’s Movement and Latin America: Participation and Democracy (1994); Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe (1998); Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice (2006); and Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America (2009). Her essays have appeared in World Politics, Foreign Policy, Signs, Journal of Democracy, the International Feminist Journal of Politics and in many collections. She is writing a book on Power and Citizenship in Machiavelli and Hobbes and, with her husband, Abraham F. Lowenthal, is collaborating on a book on US-Latin American relations.
Dr. Jaquette served as president of the Association for Women in Development (AWID) in 1990-91, and as president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) from 1995 to 1997. She has been a visiting fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford), the Women and Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School (Harvard), the Latin American Program at Stanford, and FLACSO (Chile), and is an Adjunct Research Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. She co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of US UNIFEM and has been recognized by the Status of Women Commission and the City Council of Los Angeles for her work on international women’s issues. She is a founding member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the American Political Science Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the International Studies Association, and the International Political Science Association.