Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva, born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva on 24 June 1941, is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s; she has taught at Columbia University and is now a professor emerita at Universite Paris Cite. The author of more than thirty books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize awarded by the Havel Foundation. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, Semiotike, in 1969, and her sizeable body of work addresses intertextuality, the semiotic and abjection across linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, and political and cultural analysis; she is prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought and is also the founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.