Laura Wexler

Professor of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, Yale University

Laura Wexler is co-Principal Investigator of the Women, Religion and Globalization project. She 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 Sandra Matthews. Tender Violence was awarded the 2001 annual 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, along with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, the volume Interpretation and the Holocaust, a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism. Professor Wexler’s many other publications 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 recent 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 centers on visual representations of the gendered politics of race in the United States and includes forthcoming studies of the writer Kate Chopin and the photographers Diane Arbus and Roman Vishniac. She co-founded, and for the past eight years has directed, the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. She has served on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. She is a member of the Steering Committee and of the Advisory Council of the Women Faculty Forum, and serves on the American Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, International Affairs, and Judaic Studies Councils.

Working Group Affiliations

Engendering the Archive, Project Director

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project, Project Director