History & Art History

Alison Landsberg received her Ph.D. in literature and film from the University of Chicago in 1996. Her first book, entitled Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) argues that mass cultural technologies such as the cinema and the experiential museum have made it increasingly possible for individuals to take on memories of events through which they did not live, memories that have important ramifications for their subjectivities, politics, and ethics. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled “Squaw Men and Indian Wives: Mapping Gender, Race and National Belonging, 1870-1930,” which explores the evolution of the category “squaw man” and uses it as an analytical prism through which to read the period from 1870 to 1930, a time during which both racial segregation was juridically sanctioned and institutionalized, and women’s “place in society” was actively being scripted. In so doing, the book will make visible changing assumptions about racial identity, gender, national belonging and citizenship. Recent publications have appeared in The Liquid Metal Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (2004), Film and Popular Memory, ed. Paul Grainge (2003) and The Cyberculture Reader (2000). Her research interests include early cinema, race and self-making, museums and the installation of memory, and the politics of consumption.

American studies; film and mass culture; cultural memory