Laura Wexler is Professor Women's Gender, & Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale. Noted scholar of visual culture, 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 photographer Sandra Matthews. Tender Violence was awarded the 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 recent studies of the writings of Frederic Douglass, and the photographs of La Toya Ruby Frazier. Her current research interests center on family photographs and national memory.

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