Laura Wexler is Professor of American Studies and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds an affiliation with the Film Studies Program, the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and the Public Humanities Program. In 1999 she founded, and she continues to direct, the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. Wexler’s scholarship centers upon intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class with film and photography in the United States, from the nineteenth century to the present. Her book, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism, won the Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory. She is co-author, with Sandra Matthews, of Pregnant Pictures, and co-editor, with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, of Interpretation and the Holocaust. Currently she is working on a monograph entitled The Awakening of Cultural Memory, using historical photographs as a source of resistance to the politics of white supremacy in the formation of contemporary American reading practices. In addition, she is composing a volume of essays entitled “The Look, the Gaze and the Relay Race: Photography and Everyday Memory”, exploring of the work of Diane Arbus, Roman Vishniac, Randolf Linsly Simpson, and the F.S.A./O.W.I. photographers, among others.

For more information click here