Barbara Jane Harlow was born in Cleveland, Ohio on December 18, 1948. She received a bachelor's degree in French and philosophy from Simmons College in Boston in 1970, a master's degree in Romance languages and literatures from the University of Chicago in 1972, and a doctorate in comparative literature from the State University of New York, Buffalo in 1977. She also studied in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the École Normale Supérieure, and in Berlin at the Free University. She taught at Wesleyan University and Hobart and William Smith Colleges before joining the English department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1985.
She wrote several books during her lifetime including Resistance Literature, Barred: Women, Writing and Political Detention, and After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing. She also translated Jacques Derrida's Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles and Ghassan Kanafani's Palestine's Children. She was co-editor for The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature, Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook, Archives of Empire: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal, and Archives of Empire: The Scramble for Africa. She died from esophageal cancer on January 28, 2017 at the age of 68.
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