Jane Caputi Profile Photo

Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies & Author

Jane Caputi is Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She loves teaching and learning, and as part of that has written four books, most recently Call Your Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene (Oxford University Press, 2020). She also has made two educational documentaries, The Pornography of Everyday Life (2006) distributed by Berkeley Media and Feed the Green: Feminist Voices for the Earth (2016), distributed by Women Make Movies. In 2016, she was named Eminent Scholar of the Year by the American Culture/Popular Culture Association and in 2020 the Association for the Study of Women in Mythology gave her their annual Saga Award for contributions to women’s history and culture.

62
July 15, 2026

Bloody Sacrifices

40 years ago, Jane Caputi wrote a brilliant book about serial sex killers - The Age of Sex Crime - which is as relevant today as it was in 1987. In the book, Jane analyzes the histories of well-known, individual serial sex killers, from Jack The Ripper to The Boston Strangler to Son of Sam to Ted Bundy and many more - and answers fundamental questions about how and why they came to be - and how they fit into our cultural narratives. Jane argues that far from being monstrous aberrations, serial s...
Guest: Jane Caputi
26
Oct. 31, 2023

The Great Overwelm

Our language - profane, sublime and everything in between - holds hidden truths about our cultural heritage, our current reality, and who determines it. Etymology, the study of the origins of words, can unlock this knowledge. Jane Caputi has spent her career unearthing the history and meaning of words, our language, cultural beliefs, and how we know what we know - with a particular focus on sex, violence and the destruction of our natural environment. In this episode we talk about Jane’s new b...
Guest: Jane Caputi