Jean Franco (March 31, 1924 – December 14, 2022) was a British-born American academic and literary critic known for her pioneering work on Latin American literature.
[1] Educated at Manchester and London, she taught at London, Essex (where she was the university's first professor of Latin American literature),[2] and Stanford, and was latterly professor emerita at Columbia University.
Jean Franco's research was wide-ranging and voluminous.
She particularly focused on women and women's writing and was a pioneer of Latin American cultural studies.
[3] Franco died on December 14, 2022, at the age of 98.