Julia Kristeva is an internationally renowned psychoanalyst, linguist, and semiotician. Born in Bulgaria in 1941, she emigrated to Paris in 1965 to pursue her doctoral studies under Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, and later Claude Lévi-Strauss at L’École Pratique des Hautes Études. She soon joined the Tel Quel Group and through it became active in French politics, including the upheavals of May 1968. During her early years, Kristeva published many articles in Tel Quel, joining its editorial board in 1970. She gained her state doctorate in Paris in 1973, and, in 1974, assumed the Chair of Linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. She has been a practicing psychoanalyst since 1979, and has held visiting professorships at Columbia University in New York and, since 1992, at the University of Toronto. One of France’s major contemporary theorists, Kristeva has achieved international recognition in a number of academic disciplines and has stimulated theoretical activity in literary criticism and feminism. Kristeva is the author of many books, several of which have been translated into English and published by Columbia University Press. The essays in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature analyze visual and literary texts as manifestations of the semiotic and symbolic dimensions of language. Powers of Horror presents a psychoanalytic discussion of the process of abjection and relates it to the historical exclusion of women. In Tales of Love, Kristeva examines historical myths of love to probe the significance of idealization for autonomizing a subject in language. In the Beginning Was Love explores whether psychoanalysis and faith can be reconciled or whether they must remain implacable antagonists. Black Sun addresses the subject of melancholia, taking the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated. Proust and the Sense of Time presents an original and compelling reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Strangers to Ourselves is a semanalysis of estrangement. Nations Without Nationalism offers an impassioned plea for tolerance and for commonality, aimed at a world brimming over with racism and xenophobia. The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, which will be published in English in early 2000, illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes. A much anticipated trilogy of intellectual biographies of three extraordinary and influential women—the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and the French writer Colette—is also in the works. The first volume, Le génie féminin: Hannah Arendt, has just been published in Paris by Fayard. Kristeva has also written three novels: The Samurai, The Old Man and the Wolves, and Possessions. She will be featured in the New York Public Library’s calendar, Celebrating Women Writers 2000, for June.