Kristin Ross

Kristin Ross (born 1953) is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. She is primarily known for her work on French literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Life and work

Ross received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1981 and since then has written a number of books, including The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988), Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995) and May '68] and its Afterlives (2002). She edited Anti-Americanism (2004) with Andrew Ross (no relation). In 2015, her book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune appeared.

For Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, Ross was awarded a Critic's Choice Award and the Lawrence Wylie Award for French Cultural Studies. Professor Ross has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Ross has also translated several works from French including Jacques Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Along with her research interests in French culture and literature, Ross's work gains its focus through her interest in urban and revolutionary history, theory, politics, ideology and popular culture.

Selected bibliography

• (co-editor, with Alice Kaplan). Everyday Life, co-ed., Yale French Studies, no. 73. Fall 1987. ISBN 9780300040470
• The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. University of Minnesota Press. 1988. ISBN 9780816616862
  • French translation, Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2012.
• Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. MIT Press. 1995. ISBN 9780262181617
  • French translation, re-edition, Flammarion, 2006.
• May '68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago. 2002. ISBN 9780226727974
  • French translation, Le Monde Diplomatique/Complexe, 2005. Re-edition Editions Agone 2011.
• (co-editor, with Andrew Ross). Anti-Americanism. NYU Press, 2004. ISBN 9780814775677
• (contributor) Democracy in What State?. Columbia University Press, 2011. ISBN 9780231152983
• Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. Verso, 2015. ISBN 9781781688397
  • French edition, La Fabrique, 2015.