Leora Auslander, Professor of History at the University of Chicago
Leora Auslander's publications in the field of material culture
Any European or American newspaper of the last few decades includes at least one story in which a seemingly trivial object lies at the heart of a social drama: the expulsion of Muslim girls from French schools for refusing to remove their head-scarves; kids killing each other over brand-name sneakers in Chicago; a boycott of the clothing chain Benetton because of its use of race in its advertisements; the revelation that Michael Jordan earns more for his endorsement of Nikes than Nike's entire labor force earns in a year; French farmers vandalizing a McDonalds to express their outrage at Americanization. In all of these incidents, everyday goods—their production, marketing, or use—have become fraught. My work seeks to explain how and why everyday things have become catalysts for conflict, means of expressing identities and constructing selves, vehicles for dissenting opinions, and sites of unexpected state intervention. My research agenda is based on the hypothesis that key to these questions is the close and careful study of material culture, one that always links the concreteness of everyday goods to the abstractions of polity, society, and economy.
My publications in the domain of material culture and the histories of production and consumption include: Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996); Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (Oxford: Berg Press, 2008; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) (French translation: Des révolutions culturelles: La politique du quotidien en Grande-Bretagne, en Amérique et en France. Series: Le Temps du Genre, Agnès Fine and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds. (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2011); Les objets ont-ils un genre? Fall, 2014 issue of Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés. Co-editor (with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel) and two on-going book projects:
Living Jewishly in twentieth-century Paris and Berlin and Commemorating Death, Obscuring Life? The Conundrums of Memorialization.
"America's Cultural Revolution in Transnational Perspective," chapter 33 in the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Jane Kamensky and Edward Gray, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 612-632.
"Jews and Material Culture," Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels, eds. Cambridge Modern Jewish History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
"Material Culture," in Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Eds. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2012).
Participant in a Conversation on the articulation of markets, consumption, and revolution in the Annales Historiques de la Révolution, Autumn 2012.
"Negotiating Embodied Difference: Veils, Minarets, Kippas and Sukkot in Contemporary Europe," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 51 (2011): Säkularisierung und Neuformierung des Religiösen.
"Looking Across the Threshold: Persistence as Experiment in Time, Space, and Genre," Postwar: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg, ed. Jeffrey Skoller, (London: Blackdog Press 2010), pp. 98-121.
"Approche croisée des aspects culturels des révolutions modernes dans le monde atlantique,"Les Cahiers d'IRICE, (Winter, 2010).
"Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies," in Unsettling Histories, eds. Alf Lüdtke and Sebastien Jobs (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010), pp. 127-146.
Participant, "AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture," American Historical Review, (December, 2009): 1354-1404.
"The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural Practice Jewish?" Jewish Social Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (March, 2009): 47-64.
"Accommodation, Resistance, and Eigensinn: Evolués and Sapeurs between Africa and Europe," in Belinda Davis, Michael Wildt, eds. Alltag, Erfahurng, Eigensinn: Historisch-Anthropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2008), pp. 205-217.
"Historians and Architectural History," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians March, 2006
"Regeneration through the Everyday? Furniture in Revolutionary Paris," in a special issue of Art History (vol. 28:1, Spring 2005), ed. Katie Scott, and "Beyond Words," American Historical Review October, 2005
"Sambo in Paris: Race and Racism in the Iconography of Everyday Life", co-authored with Tom Holt, in Susan Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, (Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
"The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France," in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds. Sex of Things: Essays on Gender and Consumption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 79-112.
"Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of Consciousness," in Lenard Berlanstein, ed. Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993).
"After the Revolution: Recycling Ancien Régime Style in the Nineteenth Century," in Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth Williams, eds. Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 144-174.
Auslander's work in the field of feminist history and gender studies
I have had a very long-standing interest in the analysis of the construction of gender difference. My writings in the field range quite widely including a critical anPLalysis of the work of three key feminist philosophers (Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and Denise Riley), another essay in which I argued that nineteenth-century French conceptions of masculinity were fundamentally important in shaping the nature of demands made by organized labor; an article that traces the ways in which different consumption activities were gendered (and the implications of that gendering); and a co-edited volume on "protective" labor legislation in France and the United States in which we attempted to demonstrate that both conceptions of the meanings of both gender and sexuality have influenced that legislation. All of these projects were driven by a conviction that adequate analysis of how differences between women and men are constructed required the concept of gender. That is, only through analysis of the simultaneous construction of masculinity and femininity, and of male roles and female roles can one grasp either. I was equally persuaded that analysis of gender and of sexuality needed to be done hand-in-hand. Trying to understand the conditions of women's labor, for example, without knowing a given society's conception of women's sexuality will necessarily be only partially successful. These convictions formed the core of my intellectual agenda as the Director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago (1996-1999).
My work in the field of feminist history and gender studies includes:
"Les objets ont-ils un genre?" Fall, 2014 issue of Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés. Co-editor (with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel)
"America's Cultural Revolution in Transnational Perspective," article for the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Jane Kamensky and Edward Gray,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
French translation: Des révolutions culturelles: La politique du quotidien en Grande-Bretagne, en Amérique et en France. Series: Le Temps du Genre, Agnès Fine and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds. (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2011).
Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (Oxford: Berg Press, 2008; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
"Gender at the Intersection of the Disciplines," Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks, vol. 2 (2006) pp. 434-446.
"Women's Suffrage, Citizenship Law and National Identity: Gendering the Nation-State in France and Germany, 1871-1918," in Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake, eds.
Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 138-152.
"Le genre de la nation" Fall, 2000 issue of Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés on gender, citizenship and the nation, co-edited (with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel).
"Do Women's + Feminist + Men's + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?" Differences 9/3 (Fall 1997):1-30.
Différence des sexes et protection sociale (XIXe-XXe siècles), a co-edited volume with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995).
"Feminist Theory and Social History: Explorations in the Politics of Identity," Radical History Review 53 (Fall 1992): 158-176.
Leora Auslander's recent research
In my research in Jewish history I walk a fine line between an approach that privileges the particularities and distinctiveness of the Jewish tradition and one which emphasizes commonalities among minority, diasporic cultures. Thus an analysis of the Jewish engagement with modernist aesthetics in the 1920s requires investigation not only of the Jewish traditions that survived both exclusion and emancipation but also of the other encounters between minority diasporic communities and modernist aesthetics in the Harlem Renaissance or the Négritude movement of the same period. That kind of comparative approach not only enables more powerful analyses of the minority cultures, but also of the dominant culture in which they were embedded and the nature of the interaction between them.
My most recent area of research is at the intersection of Jewish history and material culture.
1) Living Jewishly in twentieth-century Paris and Berlin
2) Commemorating Death, Obscuring Life? The Conundrums of Memorialization
"Jews and Material Culture," Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels, eds. Cambridge Modern Jewish History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012).
"Negotiating Embodied Difference: Veils, Minarets, Kippas and Sukkot in Contemporary Europe," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 51 (2011): Säkularisierung und Neuformierung des Religiösen.
"Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies," in Unsettling Histories, eds. Alf Lüdtke and Sebastien Jobs (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010), pp. 127-146.
"The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural Practice Jewish?" Jewish Social Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (March, 2009): 47-64.
"Looking Across the Threshold: Persistence as Experiment in Time, Space, and Genre," Postwar: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg, ed. Jeffrey Skoller, (London: Blackdog Press 2010), pp. 98-121.
"Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris," Journal of Contemporary History 40/2 (2005): 237-259.
"Resisting Context: The Spiritual Objects of Tobi Kahn," in Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn, ed. Emily Bilski (New York: Avoda/Hudson Hills, 2004) pp. 71-78.
"'Jewish Taste'? Jews, and the aesthetics of everyday life in Paris and Berlin, 1933-1942," in Rudy Koshar, ed. Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002), pp. 299-318.
"Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Dilemmas of Memory Legacies," accepted for a volume edited by Alf Lüdtke and "The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural Practice Jewish?" solicited for an issue of Jewish Social Studies.