Daphne Patai

In addition to her work on women's studies and feminism, she continues to write about utopian studies and oral history. Many of her opinion pieces have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in the online magazine Minding the Campus. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a non-profit organization devoted to protecting First Amendment rights on college campuses. In 2008 Patai published What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs (Rowman and Littlefield) -- which brings together her writing on the culture wars of the past two decades and also includes a few new pieces. Her latest book, published in 2010 in Brazil, is a selection of her essays titled Historia Oral, Feminismo e Politica (São Paulo: Letra e Voz).

Among Patai's concerns are what she sees as draconian sexual harassment regulations as implemented in the academic world. She argues that contemporary feminism is poisoned by a strong element of hostility to sexual interaction between men and women and an effort to suppress it through micromanagement of everyday relations. This idea is developed in her 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. Patai has also written about the negative impact of Critical Theory on the study of literature. Together with Will H. Corral she edited Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (Columbia University Press), a collection of essays by fifty scholars taking issue with Theory orthodoxies of the past few decades.

Daphne Patai (born 1943) is an American scholar and author. She is professor emeritus of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her PhD is in Brazilian literature, but her early work also focused on utopian and dystopian fiction. She is the daughter of the anthropologist Raphael Patai.

Patai is credited with discovering who wrote the notable feminist dystopian novel Swastika Night and other feminist speculative fiction in the 1930s. They were published under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine but were written by an English woman named Katharine Burdekin. Patai has been involved in their republication.