Faculty

Jean-Christophe Agnew is Professor of American Studies and History. He is the author of Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (1986) and numerous articles on consumer culture and cultural history. Most recently he co-edited with Roy Rosenzweig A Companion to Post-1945 America (2002). His courses include "Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective," "The American Century, 1941-1961," and "Power: Historical and Theoretical Approaches."

Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Prof. Butler received his Ph.D. at Minnesota in 1972. He is the author of The Origins of American Denominational Order (1978); The Huguenots in America (1983); Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990); Religion in American History: A Reader (1997); Religion in Colonial America (2000, a book for adolescent readers); Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (2000), as well as many articles, and is co-author of Religion in American Life: A Short History (2002). His current book project is God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. His graduate courses include seminars in American religious and social history.

Hazel V. Carby is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization https://research.yale.edu/irgg/index.html .  Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999) and her current work-in-progress is Child of Empire.  Recent publications include: “Postcolonial Translations,”  Ethnic and  Racial Studies 30/2 December 2006; “US/UK Special Relationship: The Culture of Torture in Abu Ghraib and Lynching Photographs,” NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art no. 20 (Fall 2006): 60-71;  “Becoming a Modern Racialized Subject: ‘detours through our pasts to produce ourselves anew,’ an exploration of the influence of Stuart Hall, forthcoming in Cultural Studies ; and “Lost in Translation,” an introduction to CCCS Working Papers in Cultural Studies: Volume 2, forthcoming, London: Routledge 2007.

Professor Carby teaches courses on issues of race, gender and sexuality through the culture and literature of the Caribbean and its diasporia; through transnational and postcolonial literature and theory; through representations of the black female body; and through the genres of science fiction. 

George Chauncey Professor of History and American Studies, is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 and Why Marriage?  The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality, as well as the co-editor of Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past and special journal issues on gender history and transnational approaches to sexuality.  He is currently completing a book on The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era.  With Joanne Meyerowitz, he is co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. 

Edward S. Cooke, Jr.
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John P. Demos is Samuel Knight Professor of History. Among his publications are A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (1970); Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (1982); Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course (1986); and The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994). His graduate courses include readings and research seminars on early American history, on family history, and on historical narrative.

Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies. He is the author of
Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (1987); Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (1987); The
Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997); and Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004). He has taught graduate courses on cultural theory, social movements, and twentieth-century cultural history, and is currently leading a working group on globalization and culture.

Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies, focuses on the intersections between American literature and world cultures. She has written a book on Melville, Empire for Liberty (1989), a book on law and literature, Residues of Justice (1996), and put together several collaborative volumes: Rethinking Class (1994); Literature and Science (2002), a special issue of American Literature; and American Literary Globalism (2005), a special issue of ESQ. Her new book, Through Other Continents (2006), invokes the duration and extension of the planet to anchor American literature, reading it as part of the world's fabric, an effect of "deep time." This is also the orientation of a co-edited volume, Shades of the Planet (2007), and of her next book, After Troy: Ancient Tragedy and Modern Catastrophes.

Kathryn Dudley is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology. Her published work includes The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (1994) and Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America's Heartland (2000). She is the recipient of the 2000 Margaret Mead Award for anthropological research and writing that reaches a broadly concerned public.  Her current work examines the cultural history of guitar-making in North America since the 1960s.  She teaches courses on American communities, rural and urban market economies, music cultures, and ethnographic representation.

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John Mack Faragher is Arthur Unobskey Professor of History, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders and Chair of the American Studies Program. His books include Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979); Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986); Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992); The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000); and A Great and Noble Scheme: The Expulsion of the French Acadians (2005). His graduate courses include seminars in the history of the American West.

Seth Fein is Assistant Professor of History. He is the author of articles and chapters about transnationalism, audiovisual culture and the international history of the Americas. He is completing a book called Transnational Projections: The United States in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema and working on another about the USIA and Latin American television during the 1960s. His graduate offerings include Culture in U.S. International and Transnational Histories.

Glenda Gilmore is Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History.

Glenda E. Gilmore's Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 came out in January 2008 from W. W. Norton Company. Her book Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1986-1920 won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, and Yale's Heyman Prize. She edited Who Were the Progressives (2002) and co-edited Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2001). She is at work on a history of the United States in the twentieth century with her co-author Thomas Sugrue of the University of Pennsylvania. Gilmore has appeared frequently on NPR and in PBS Documentaries. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Radcliffe at Harvard University, and, in 2006-2007, was the John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992.

A recipient of Yale's Graduate Mentoring Award, she offers graduate reading and research courses in 20th century political and social history, African American history after 1865, and the history of the New South. She teaches undergraduate courses on African American history, the Progressive Era, and lectures on U.S. Political and Social History.

Ron Gregg is Senior Lecturer and Programming Director in the Film Studies Program. As a Senior Lecturer, he teaches courses on queer cinema (both Hollywood and avant-garde), classical Hollywood, and the impact of globalization and digital technology on recent Hollywood film. As Programming Director, he organizes an annual series of campus visits and workshops by filmmakers and scholars and also works with other FSP faculty to organize major film conferences and other events. Before joining the Yale faculty, he taught film history at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, St. Cloud State University, and Duke University. He has published articles on topics ranging from MGM’s management of the image of its 1920s gay star William Haines to queer representation in the competing videos produced during Oregon's 1992 anti-gay rights ballot measure campaign. He has also curated film and video programming for the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Chicago's Gerber-Hart Gay and Lesbian Library, and the University of Chicago Lesbian and Gay Studies Project. He received his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from the University of Oregon.

Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and of American Studies. She is the author of many books about the history of the built environment and the politics of design, most recently Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (2003). Her earlier books include Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (1976); The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (1981); Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (1984, rev. ed 2002); and The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1995). Her graduate offerings include seminars on the history of cities and suburbs, visual representation of contemporary urban development, and feminist theories of space.

Jonathan Holloway is Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies. He is primarily interested in race politics and identity in post-emancipation America. He is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002), the editor of Ralph Bunche's A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (2005), and the co-editor of the anthology Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century (2007). He is pursuing an interdisciplinary history of memory and racial humiliation in his next book, Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory, Identity, and Politics in Black America, 1941-2000.

Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies, African American Studies, and History. He received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University in 1992, and is the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2006); What Have They Built You to Do? THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He is currently at work on Odetta's Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History. His teaching interests are clustered under the general rubric of race in U.S. political culture, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship. uctures of U.S. citizenship.

Mary Lui is Assistant Professor of American Studies and History. Her primary research interests include: Asian American history, urban studies, women and gender studies, and public history. She is the author of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton University Press, 2005). The book uses a 1909 unsolved murder case to examine race, gender, and interracial sexual relations in the cultural, social and spatial formation of New York City Chinatown from 1870-1920.

Joanne Meyerowitz is Professor of History and American Studies. She is the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988) and How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002), and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994) and History and September 11th (2003). From 1999 to 2004, she was the editor of the Journal of American History. Her current project examines theories of human difference in the mid-twentieth-century U.S. Her areas of teaching are twentieth-century U.S. history, women, gender, and sexuality.

Alyssa Mt. Pleasant is Assistant Professor of American Studies and History. Her research focuses on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) history and American Indians in the Northeast. She teaches broadly in American Indian history and offers courses in American Indian Studies. Mt. Pleasant has two forthcoming essays about Indian-missionary relations. She is currently at work on a manuscript about the Buffalo Creek reservation, and is developing a project about Seneca women in the nineteenth century.

Charles Musser is Professor of American Studies, Theater Studies and Film Studies as well as co-chair of the Film Studies Program. His books include The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990), High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920, with Carol Nelson (1991), and Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (1997). He also co-edited Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (2001) with Pearl Bowser and Jane Gaines. He recently edited a special issue of Film History on "Documentary before Verité (2006).  He has published a number of essays on different aspects of Paul Robeson's film career and is currently writing a book entitled Truth and Documentary in the Age of George W. Bush.  His graduate courses concentrate on film historiography, documentary, and American cinema.

David Musto is Professor of Child Psychiatry and the History of Medicine. His publications include The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (3rd edition). His graduate courses include a seminar on the development of American policies regarding alcohol and narcotics.

Alondra Nelson is Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Studies and Sociology.  Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of the historical and socio-cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine; racial formation processes in biomedicine and technoculture; social movements; and social and cultural theory. She is co-editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001) and is currently completing the book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race. Her current research examines traditional and genetic "root-seeking" and the impact of these pursuits on contemporary understandings of race & ethnicity, diaspora and ancestry and on practices of commemoration; this study is tentatively titled Reconciliation Projects: Slavery, Memory and the Social Uses of Genetics.

Alexander Nemerov teaches and writes on topics of American visual culture from the eighteenth century to the 1960s. He is the author of three books--Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures (University of California Press, 2005), The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (University of California Press, 2001), and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (Yale University Press, 1995). He has also written numerous articles, including most recently "The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N.C. Wyeth's Wreck of the "Covenant" (Art Bulletin, March 2006) and "The Flight of Form: Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s" (Critical Inquiry, Summer 2005). His forthcoming publications include the essay "Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era" in the upcoming catalogue Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited, which will accompany the High Museum of Art's Morris Louis exhibition opening in October 2006. His exhibition Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story, will be on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts from June 10 to October 29, 2006. Professor Nemerov's current project is a book on a single night's performance of Macbeth during Abraham Lincoln's presidency.
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Naomi Pabst, Ph.D., History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000, is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies.  Her teaching and research focuses on the diversity among African Americans and on the complexities of black individual and collective identity.  She is currently completing a manuscript that spotlights “unusual” or “unexpected” black experiences while also examining black cultural politics and the vicissitudes of African American life.  Taking a humanities approach, Pabst’s research draws from black diasporic literature, cultural studies, critical theory, feminist theory, critical mixed race studies, and transnational studies.  Navigating these fields, her scholarly work examines the boundaries of blackness with an eye to who winds up on the margins, and which black subjectivities are considered at once “black” and yet “not really black.”  Pabst has published on these topics in various journals and anthologies and is sought after as an invited lecturer.  Previously she spent two years teaching and doing research at Harvard as a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities.

Diana Paulin is Assistant Professor of American Studies and English. She has published articles on racial representation, miscegenation, and performance in Theatre Journal, Cultural Critique and The Journal of Drama Theory and Criticism, as well as a chapter in the Critical Anthology of African American Performance and Theater History. Paulin's research interest include late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century U.S. fiction and drama with a focus on racial representations, African American literature and culture, and performance studies.

Patricia R. Pessar is Professor (Adjunct) of American Studies and Anthropology. She is the author of When Borders Don’t Divide: Labor Migration and Refugee Movements in the Americas (1988); Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration (1991); A Visa For a Dream: Dominicans in New York (1995); and From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture (2005). Her teaching and research interests include transnationalism and globalization, gender and ethnic studies, and migration in the Americas. She is currently completing a new book entitled Gendered Migrations and Geographies of Power: A Critical Feminist Engagement with Migration Studies.

Stephen J. Pitti is Professor of History and American Studies, and the Director of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program. The author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (2003), he teaches graduate seminars on the history of Latinos, comparative civil rights movements, and race relations in the American West, and he is currently at work on a biography of Cesar Chavez and on a study of deportations and repatriations from California.

Sally M. Promey is Professor of American Studies; and Deputy Director and Professor of Religion and Visual Culture (Institute of Sacred Music).  She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religious Studies.  Her scholarship explores the visual and material cultures of religions in the United States from the early colonial period through the present.  She is author of Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton, 1999) and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana, 1993) as well as contributing author and co-editor of The Visual Culture of American Religions (California, 2001).  Among her recent articles and book chapters are essays titled “Mirror Images:  Framing the Self in Early New England Material Piety”; “Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940-1965”; “Situating Visual Culture”; and “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.”  She serves on the editorial boards of Material Religion, American Art, and Winterthur Portfolio and on the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Her current book project, Religion in Plain View: The Public Aesthetics of American Belief, examines the public display of religion in the United States from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first.

Joseph Roach has chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. His most recent book is It (Michigan, 2007), a study of charismatic celebrity. His other books and articles include Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia, 1996), which won the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA and the Calloway Prize from NYU, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Michigan, 1993), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History, and essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, Discourse, Theater, Text and Performance Quarterly, and others. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in English and Chair of the Theater Studies Advisory Committee at Yale.

Marc Robinson is Professor of English and Theater Studies and Professor (Adjunct) of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. He is the author of /The Other American Drama/ and the editor of /The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes/ and /Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile./ His essays and reviews have appeared in such periodicals as /The Drama Review, Theater/, /Performing Arts Journal/, /Modern Drama,/ and /The Village Voice/. He holds a D.F.A. (1992) in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama. His new book, The American Play, will be published by Yale University Press in Spring 2009.

Michael Roemer is Professor of Filmmaking in the School of Art and Professor of American Studies. His films include "Cortile Cascino" (1962), "Nothing But a Man" (1964), "Faces of Israel" (1967), "Dying" (1976), "Pilgrim, Farewell" (1980), "Haunted" (1984) and "The Plot Against Harry" (1970, 1990). He also is the author of Telling Stories (1987).

Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race at Migration, and the Associate Master for Ezra Stiles College.  Her scholarship concerns the femicide in Ciudad Juárez, transnational migration, border governance, and social movements in the Americas. She is the author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands (NYU Press, 2008), and is currently at work on a second book project entitled, The Carceral Border: Social Violence and Governmentality on the Frontiers of Our America. She serves on the board of Junta for Progressive Action, a community agency serving the Latina/o community of Fair Haven, and is a contributor to local and transnational projects for immigrant and human rights.

Stephen Skowronek is Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Science. He is the author of Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982), and The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (1993) and managing editor of Studies in American Political Development. His graduate courses include seminars on American politics, American political development, and presidential leadership.

Robert B. Stepto is Professor of American Studies, African-American Studies, and English. Among his publications are From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979); Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1979); Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979).   His latest book is Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography (1999). His graduate courses include seminars on autobiography in America and modern Afro-American poets.

Harry S. Stout is Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History. Among his publications are The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (1986) and George Whitefield, Divine Dramatist (1991), and several edited books, including New Directions in American Religious History (1997), with Darryl Hart,  Religion in American History: A Reader (1997) with Jon Butler, and Religion and the Civil War (1998).  His most recent publication is Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (Viking Press, 2006). His graduate courses include seminars on American revivalism and Jonathan Edwards, a graduate readings course on religion and American society and a research seminar on the same. He also teaches a junior seminar on The Civil War.

John Szwed is John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, American Studies, and Film Studies. His publications include Afro-American Anthropology (1970); Afro-American Folk Culture: An Annotated Bibliography (1978); After Africa: Extracts from British Travel Accounts (1983); Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (1997); Jazz 101 (2000); So What: The Life of Miles Davis (2002); Crossovers: Essays on Race, Music, and American Culture (2005); Doctor Jazz, a book included with Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax (2005), for which he was awarded a Grammy in 2006; and Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America's Creole Soul (with Robert Farris Thompson, Nick Spitzer, and Roger Abrahams) (2006). He is at work on a biography of Alan Lomax. His courses include Film Noir and 1940's America; Jazz and Film; The Anthropology of Sound; Introduction to Jazz Studies; and New Orleans: Rebuilding the Musical City.

John Harley Warner is Avalon Professor of History of Medicine, History, and American Studies. He is the author of The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America (1986; 1997) and Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (1998; 2003), and co-editor of Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health (2001) and Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (2004). He teaches the cultural and social history of medicine, health cultures, disease, and public health. He is now working on a study of the epistemological, aesthetic, technical, moral, and political choices in the grounding of modern American medicine.

Michael Warner is Professor of English and American Studies, with diverse interests in colonial and antebellum America, social theory, media studies, queer theory and politics.  He is currently at work on a study of secularism, including both the theoretical understanding of secularism in the present and a historical inquiry into the development of secularism in America.  Among his books are The Letters of the Republic:  Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century AmericaThe Letters of the Republic:  Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 1990); Publics and CounterpublicsPublics and Counterpublics (Zone Books, 2002); The Trouble with Normal:  Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (The Free Press, 1999;  Harvard Univ. Press, 2000);  The Portable Walt Whitman (New York:  Penguin, 2003); American SermonsAmerican Sermons (Library of America, 1999); Fear of a Queer Planet:  Queer Politics and Social TheoryFear of a Queer Planet:  Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and with Myra Jehlen, The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (Routledge, 1997).

Laura Wexler is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of

 U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co-authored with photographer Sandra Matthews.  Tender Violence was awarded the 2001 Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory.  She also co-edited, with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, the volume Interpretation and the Holocaust, as a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism.  Professor Wexler’s many other publications on photography and American visual culture include a recent essay entitled “’Laughing Ben’” on ‘The Old Plantation’,” in Photography and Race Forum, edited by Elizabeth Abel and Leigh Raiford, in English Language Notes 44.2 (Fall/Winter 2006); and a chapter entitled “The Fair Ensemble:  Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904,” in Haunted by Empire; Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler (Duke University Press, 2006).

Her current research interests center upon photographic representations of the politics of white supremacy and resistance to it in the United States.  She is working on a book entitled The Awakening of Cultural Memory: Heritage Fiction and Photographic Truth.  She is also working on the photographers Diane Arbus and Roman Vishniac; on little known photographs from the F.S.A./O.W.I archives; and on the Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. 

Professor Wexler has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals including American Quarterly, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.  She co-founded and directs the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2009.  The courses she teaches at Yale University include: “Photography and Images of the Social Body,” “Visuality and Violence,” “Photographic Memory: Public and Private Lives,” “History of U. S. Feminist Thought,” “Transnational Feminisms” and “Religion, Gender and Globalization.” Laura Wexler completed her undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College and holds M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature.  She has taught at Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University and Yale University.  Professor of American Studies and Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale since 2002, she is currently Co-Chair elect of the Women Faculty Forum of Yale University.  She served as Chair of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program from 2003-2007.  She serves on the board of the Muriel Gardiner Society for Psychoanalysis and the Humanities and on the board of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.  She is currently a principal investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization Project at Yale, a joint venture among the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Yale Divinity School and the Yale Program in International Affairs, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the MacMillan Center at Yale.

In the Fall of 2008, Professor Wexler will be teaching Women’s Studies and History of U. S. Photography at Peking University in Beijing.

Kariann Yokota is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and History. Her research and teaching interests include 18th and 19th century transatlantic history, material culture, cultural history and ethnic studies. Yokota is currently working on a manuscript which examines the transatlantic exchange of objects, ideas and people between America and the former mother country during the post-colonial period.

Faculty Emeriti

David Brion Davis
Kai Erikson
David Montgomery
Jules Prown
Alan Trachtenberg

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