Lois Banner is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Southern California. She received a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a PhD in women’s history from Columbia University. Banner is the author of ten books, including American Beauty (1983), In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power and Sexuality (1992), and the prize-winning Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (2003), all with Alfred A. Knopf, as well as Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (Bloomsbury, 2012). In 1998, she published Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women (Columbia), an autobiographical study of her personal journey into the Muslim religion. Her work has also appeared extensively in journals including the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, American Quarterly, Signs, and Cinema Studies.

Banner, along with historian Mary S. Hartman, founded the Berkshire Conference in Women’s History. Together they published a selection of the conference papers in Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspective on the History of Women (1974), which became a classic in the field of women’s history. Banner was the first woman president of the American Studies Association, and in 2006 won the American Studies Association’s Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement. She has been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, Radcliffe Institute, and Australian National University, and has taught at a number of universities, including Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, George Washington, and the University of Maryland.