Barbara E. Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature and Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. She is a leading figure in contemporary literary theory and the author of The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading ; A World of Difference ; The Wake of Deconstruction ; and The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender . Professor Johnson is also the translator of Jacques Derrida�s Dissemination .