Hélène Cixous (French pronunciation: [elɛn siksu]; born 5 June 1937) is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College London in the UK; and Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. In 2008 she was appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University until June 2014.
Cixous was born in Oran, French Algeria, to a German Ashkenazi Jewish mother, Eve (née Klein), and a French Pied-noir Sephardic Jewish father, Georges Cixous She earned her agrégation in English in 1959 and her Doctorat ès lettres in 1968. Her main focus, at this time, was English literature and the works of James Joyce. In 1968, she published L'Exil de James Joyce ou l'Art du remplacement (The Exile of James Joyce, or the Art of Displacement) and the following year she published her first novel, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical work that won the Prix Médicis. She is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and the University of Paris VIII, whose center for women's studies, the first in Europe, she founded.
