Laura Wexler

Laura Wexler writes about the photographic cultures of the United States.  She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and has been on the faculty of Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Peking University. She is currently the Charles H. Farnam Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale, where she teaches a cycle of courses on “Visuality and Violence;” “Photography, History and Memory;” “Photography and Images of the Social Body:” Visual Kinship: Families and Photographs;” and “Imaging War/Imagining Peace”.  She is the author of Tender Violence:  Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Joan Kelley Memorial Prize, AHA); Pregnant Pictures, with Sandra Matthews; Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, with Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Leigh Raiford; and Magnum America/USA, with Peter Van Agtmael. She has published many book chapters and essays on crucial figures in the history of photography such as Frederick Douglass, Dorothea Lange, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Roman Vishniac, as well as contemporary photographers such as Jim Goldberg, Donovan Wylie; LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lorie Novak, Pablo Delano, Jo Ann Walters and George Platt Lynes. 

Professor Wexler is fa ounding director of the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale along with Cheryl Finley and Leigh Raiford, a founding member of the Steering Committee of the Feminist Technology Network (Fem/Tech/Net), and a Co-director of the award-winning Photogrammar Project, which received NEH and ACLS support to make a web-based interactive research system for visualizing the more than 170,00 photographs created by the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information between 1935-1945.  Her most recent publications are: “Highway Histories: Dorothea Lange and the War of 1933,” in Dorothea Lange: Seeing People, published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and “Regarding Sovereign History as Incomplete:  The Cherokee Outlet Land Opening Photographs,” in US History in 15 Photographs, Rebecca S. Wingo and Lauren Tilton, eds., published by Bloomsbury.  Her next book,The FemTechNet Chronicles, co-authored with Anne Balsamo, Paula Gardner, Alexandra Juhasz, Cricket Keating and Elizabeth Losh, is forthcoming in 2027 from The University of Illinois Press.  She is thrilled to be a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center in the upcoming year, working on her new manuscript: Reconciliation: How Photography Saved the South.