Leora Auslander

Woman with red hair smiling for a picture

Professor of European Social History, the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization in the College, Founding Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies

Leora Auslander focuses her research on 19th and 20th century European social and cultural history with a focus on France and Germany; material culture, everyday life and the built environment. Her primary national focus is modern France but also looked at research problems that are best treated transnationally. Her most recent book, Cultural Revolutions, moves across the Atlantic world from Britain, to colonial and early national America, and finally eastwards again to France. Auslander’s ongoing pair of projects, Diasporic Homes: Jews in Paris and Berlin, 1870-2000 and Commemorating Death, Obscuring Life? stay on the European continent but involve a comparative analysis of Paris and Berlin in the twentieth century. Auslander currently also serves as the Faculty Director of the Center in Paris for the 2018-2019 academic year.

Visiting positions in Europe at: Université de Paris, VII; Potsdam University; International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University, Giessen; Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen; Maître de Conférences Associée: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris,
Service on European Journals:
Editorial Committee member: Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire.
Editorial Board Member: Home; Jewish History and Culture
Selected, relevant conferences organized:
“Controverses sur la Cantine : Laïcités, religions, nations, XIXe-XXIe, » University of Chicago Center in Paris, June 6-7, 2019.

“Displaced People, Stolen Possessions: War, Forced Migration & Material Culture,” Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago, Paris, June 14-15, 2016.
Selected Publications on Transnational themes:
“When a Great Photographer takes Bad Photographs: Robert Haas’ Images of Exile,” in Die Stadt ohne: Juden, Ausländer, Muslime, Flüchtlinge Catalogue for an Exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Munich. May 2019.
Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018) (co-edited with Tara Zahra).
“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), 612-632.
“Negotiating Embodied Difference: Veils, Minarets, Kippas and Sukkot in Contemporary Europe,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 51 (2011): Säkularisierung und Neuformierung des Religiösen.

“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), 205-217.

“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).
"Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Practices and the Postmodern European State," Cultural Dynamics 12/3(2000): 183-209.

Cultures, Creeds, Arts, & Society