Camille Anna Paglia ( PAH-lee-ə; born April 2, 1947) is an American academic, social critic, and feminist. Paglia was a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1984 until the university's closure in 2024. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
Paglia was born in Endicott, New York, the eldest child of Lydia Anne (née Colapietro) and Pasquale Paglia. All four of her grandparents were born in Italy. Her mother emigrated to the United States at five years old from Ceccano, in the province of Frosinone, Lazio. Her father's side of the family was from the Campanian towns of Avellino, Benevento, and Caserta. Paglia was raised Catholic, and attended primary school in rural Oxford, New York, where her family lived in a working farmhouse.
Her father, a veteran of World War II, taught at the Oxford Academy high school and exposed his young daughter to art through books he brought home about French art history. In 1957, her family moved to Syracuse, New York, so that her father could begin graduate school; he eventually became a professor of Romance languages at Le Moyne College. She attended the Edward Smith Elementary School, T. Aaron Levy Junior High, and Nottingham Senior High School.
In 1992, Carmelia Metosh, her Latin teacher for three years, said, "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made (in class), she had to challenge them. She made good points then, as she does now." Paglia thanked Metosh in the acknowledgments to Sexual Personae, later describing her as "the dragon lady of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and school boards".
During her stays at a summer Girl Scout camp in Thendara, New York, she took on new names, including Anastasia (her confirmation name, inspired by the film Anastasia), Stacy, and Stanley. A crucially significant event for her was when an outhouse exploded after she poured too much quicklime into the latrine. "That symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology... and I would drop the bomb into it".
For more than a decade, Paglia was the partner of artist Alison Maddex. Paglia legally adopted Maddex's son, who was born in 2002. In 2007, the couple separated but remained "harmonious co-parents", in the words of Paglia, who lived two miles (three kilometers) apart.
Paglia is an atheist, and has stated she has "a very spiritual mystic view of the universe". She has expressed interest in astrology and has written about it in several of her works, including Sexual Personae: "I'm an astrologer – people don't mention this! I mean, everyone's attacked me for everything else. I mean, I'm an astrologer – it's right in my book. I endorse astrology. I believe in astrology. Will someone attack me for that? No!" Despite her atheism in her adulthood, Paglia was Catholic until a run-in with the nuns at her school in her teen years, during which she challenged them about why God could not forgive Satan and subsequently left the faith.
In 1964, Paglia entered Harpur College at Binghamton University. The same year, Paglia's poem "Atrophy" was published in the local newspaper. She later said that she was trained to read literature by poet Milton Kessler, who "believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature ... And oh did I believe in that". According to Paglia, while in college she punched a "marauding drunk", and takes pride in having been put on probation for committing 39 pranks. In 1968, Paglia received her B.A. degree in English from Binghamton University in 1968, graduating from Harpur as class valedictorian.
Paglia then attended Yale Graduate School where she obtained an M.Phil. degree in 1971. She claims to have been the only open lesbian at Yale from 1968 to 1972. At Yale, Paglia quarreled with Rita Mae Brown, whom she later characterized as "then darkly nihilist," and argued with the New Haven, Connecticut, Women's Liberation Rock Band when they dismissed The Rolling Stones as sexist. Paglia was mentored by Harold Bloom. Sexual Personae was then titled "The Androgynous Dream: the image of the androgyne as it appears in literature and is embodied in the psyche of the artist, with reference to the visual arts and the cinema."
In 1973, Paglia drove to an appearance by Susan Sontag at Dartmouth, hoping to arrange for her to speak at Bennington, but found it difficult to find the money for Sontag's speaking fee. Paglia staged a poster campaign urging students to attend Sontag's appearance. Sontag arrived at Bennington Carriage Barn, where she was to speak, more than an hour late, and then began reading what Paglia recalled as a "boring and bleak" short story about "nothing" in the style of a French New Novel.
Through her further study of the classics and the scholarly work of Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, Erich Neumann and others, Paglia developed a theory of sexual history that diverged sharply from several ideas then fashionable at the time, leading to her criticism of Marija Gimbutas, Carolyn Heilbrun, Kate Millett and others. She laid out her ideas on matriarchy, androgyny, homosexuality, sadomasochism and other topics in her doctoral dissertation Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, which she defended in 1974 to earn her Ph.D. from Yale University.
In the autumn of 1972, Paglia began teaching at Bennington College, which hired her in part thanks to a recommendation from Harold Bloom. At Bennington, she befriended the philosopher James Fessenden, who first taught there in the same semester.
In September 1976, she gave a public lecture drawing on her dissertation, discussing Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, followed by remarks on Diana Ross, Gracie Allen, Yul Brynner, and Stéphane Audran.
Paglia wrote that she "nearly came to blows with the founding members of the women's studies program at the State University of New York at Albany, when they categorically denied that hormones influence human experience or behavior". Similar fights with feminists and academics culminated in a 1978 incident which led her to resign from Bennington; after a lengthy standoff with the administration, Paglia accepted a settlement from the college and resigned in 1979.
Paglia finished her book Sexual Personae in the early 1980s, but could not get it published. She supported herself with visiting and part-time teaching jobs at Yale, Wesleyan, and other Connecticut colleges. Her paper, "The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queene", was published in English Literary Renaissance, Winter 1979. In April 1980, her dissertation was cited by J. Hillis Miller in his article "Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation", in Journal of Religion in Literature, but her academic career was otherwise stalled. In a 1995 letter to Boyd Holmes, she recalled: "I earned a little extra money by doing some local features reporting for a New Haven alternative newspaper (The Advocate) in the early 1980s". She wrote articles on New Haven's historic pizzerias and on an old house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
In 1984, she joined the faculty of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which merged in 1987 with the Philadelphia College of Art, to become the University of the Arts.
Paglia made cameo appearances as herself in the films It's Pat (1994), The Watermelon Woman (1996), and Henry Fool (1997).
Paglia is on the editorial board of the classics and humanities journal Arion. She wrote a regular column for Salon.com from 1995 to 2001, and again from 2007 to 2009. During 2016, Paglia briefly resumed writing a Salon column.