Carol Iannone

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'Carol Iannone is a conservative writer and literary critic. She first made her mark as a strong critic of feminism in articles such as "The Barbarism of Feminist Scholarship." She has published extensively in Commentary, National Review, First Things, Modern Age, The American Conservative, Academic Questions, and other conservative and neoconservative publications. She espouses traditionalist Roman Catholic ideology in her work.

She is the founding Vice President of the National Association of Scholars, and an editor of Academic Questions, the quarterly publication of NAS. She is a regular contributor at the Phi Beta Cons blog at National Review Online.

In 1991 her nomination by President George H.W. Bush to be on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities was strongly opposed by officers of the Modern Language Association and other academics: they argued that she was not, as board members of the NEH are supposed to be, a distinguished scholar. She had virtually no record of publication in scholarly journals, and had never authored a scholarly book: for the most part her writing consisted of attacks on black and feminist authors. Some of her detractors deemed her work racist or anti-feminist; others dismissed it as heavy-handed, poorly argued political invective. Her defenders maintained that she was indeed a distinguished scholar, and pointed to the sheer volume of her articles and reviews in conservative magazines. Each side accused the other of purely political motivation. The campaign against her, backed by many liberal academics and by Sen. Edward Kennedy, succeeded in defeating her nomination.

Iannone's interests have gone beyond literature. In her article, "Bryan was right," she wrote that Christians are mistaken when they say that God and Darwinian evolution are compatible, a view that is unsettling both to Christians who want to be accepted as part of the modern world, and to scientists who want to be respected by religious believers.

While associated throughout her career with neoconservative organizations and publications, much of Iannone's writing can be characterized as paleoconservative rather than neoconservative. In recent years she has written increasingly on issues of national identity, criticizing the neoconservative belief that America is an idea rather as a culture.

References;

New York Times, July 14, 1991 Time, July 29, 1991