Jenijoy La Belle

Jenijoy La Belle (November 5, 1943 – January 28, 2025) was a professor of English at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Her scholarship included published work on William Blake, William Shakespeare, and Theodore Roethke among others. She is also noted for work on "women's identity and physical appearance in 19th- and 20th-century literature". When appointed as an assistant professor in 1969, she was the first woman hired to join the tenure-track faculty at Caltech. She received tenure in 1979 after a contentious legal process, and retired as a full professor in 2007.