Leora Auslander
Leora Auslander Areas of Study:
Caribbean-Atlantic History Cultural Empires/Imperialism Gender and Sexuality Modern Europe Modern Jewish Race
Founding Director, Affiliated Faculty, and Member of the Board, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Member, Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies

On Research Leave Autumn 2025 Office: William Rainey Harper Memorial Library,
West Tower, room 608
Mailbox 75
 Phone: (773) 702-7940 Email Interests:

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century European social and cultural history with a focus on France and Germany; material culture, everyday life, and the built environment; Jewish history; gender history and theory; race in the Atlantic world; colonial and postcolonial Europe
Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History

Brown University, PhD '88

BIOGRAPHY

Intellectually engaged in both the United States and Europe, the primary national focus of my research is France, the setting of my first book, but I have found myself intrigued by research problems best treated transnationally, with a particular focus on the Atlantic World from the 17th century to the present. Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France, my second book, engages that world in the early modern period, while one of my current projects, with Tom Holt, Trans-Atlantic Crossings: Everyday Race in the 20th-Century Atlantic World, has a broader scope, including West Africa, the Caribbean and Brazil.  Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement, a volume co-edited with Tara Zahra, is global in reach, moving even further beyond the nation-state frame. The grounding framework for that work is diasporic practice and thought, an engagement I have developed further in my contribution to founding the University of Chicago’s Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in 2022.  An edited volume (Federica Francesconi and Joshua Teplitsky), coming out with the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2026, Domestic Diaspora: Jewish Experiences of Home, addresses these preoccupations in the context of Jewish History, while Trans-Atlantic Crossings addresses Black diasporas. 

Conceptually, my work focuses on the intersection of material culture, everyday life, and politics. I seek 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. The founding Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, my research agenda is based on the hypothesis, informed by phenomenology and feminist theory, that key to answering these questions is the close and careful study of material culture, but one that always links the concreteness of everyday goods to the abstractions of polity, society, and economy. Substantively, my most recent intellectual preoccupations have been the production and reproduction of race in the 20th and 21st century Atlantic World, the intersections of nation and religion/culture in France and Germany, and the politics of commemoration. The latter is imbricated in my commitment to the practice of collaborative knowledge production and public history.

TEACHING

Although the courses I offer are necessarily broader and more general than this research agenda, they have been systematically informed by it. I use material and well as visual and textual sources in virtually all my classes, and nearly all are transnational in reach.

Undergraduate courses (selected)

  • Trauma in the Archive
  • Race in the Atlantic World
  • Urban History
  • Colonizations Civ III
  • Jewish Civ III

Graduate courses (selected)

  • Public History Colloquium & Practicum
  • Politics of Commemoration
  • French Empire
  • Settler Colonialism (with Matthew Kruer)
  • Seminar: Race, Racism and and Anti-Racist Movements in Modern Europe

Recent fields for general examinations

  • Modern European History
  • Modern French History
  • Gender History and Theory
  • Colonialism and Anticolonial movements
  • Culture and Politics in Modern Europe
  • European Social History

Titles of some recent (or current) AB and AM theses and PhD dissertations

  • Finding La Petite Jérusalem: Jewish Maghrebi Identity in Sarcelles, 1960s-1980s
  • Central Planning and Peripheral Protest: Contested Urbanism and Suburban Annexation in Paris (1852-1871) and Chicago (1889-1909)
  • Vive la France?: African American Expatriate Writers Reckoning with the Reality of Racism and the Promise of Universalism
  • Consent: Remaking the American Body, 1860-1920
  • The Right to the Radical City: Public Space, Public History, and Prefigurative Politics in Chicago and Paris, 1870s-1940s
  • In Space We Feel Time: The Creation of Authenticity at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum 1944-2004
  • In-Between Empires: Steaming the Trans-Suez Highways of French Imperialism (1870-1930)
  • Grappling with Israel: American Jewish Feminists in the 1970’s and 80’s
  • ‘At Home’ in My Room: Jewish Spaces of Longing and Belonging in World War I through Weimar Berlin
  • The Politics of Dwelling: Making Home Between Paris and Dakar
  • “Walking Women: Muslim and Jewish Women’s Resistance in Paris and Algiers from the Holocaust to the Age of Decolonization

 

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

My publications in the domain of material culture and politics two books, two edited volumes and many articles and book chapters. The books are: Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (Oxford: Berg Press, 2008; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); French translation (Presses Universitaires de Mirail, 2009) and Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).  

Two of my current book projects are also in this area: Trans-Atlantic Crossings: Everyday Race in the 20th-Century Atlantic World (with Tom Holt) and Diasporic Homes: Jews in Paris and Berlin, 1870-2000.

The edited volumes are: Objets et Fabrication du genre. Autumn, 2014 issue (40) of Clio: Femmes, Histoire, Genre. Editor (with Rebecca Rogers and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel).  Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018) (co-edited with Tara Zahra); and, Domestic Diasporic: Jewish Experiences of Home (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026), co-edited with Federica Francesconi and Joshua Teplitsky)

My articles and book chapters in this field include: "Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of Consciousness," in Lenard Berlanstein, ed. Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); "After the Revolution: Recycling Ancien Régime Style in the Nineteenth Century," in Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth Williams, eds. Recreating Authority in Revolutionary France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 144–174; "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; “Regeneration through the Everyday? Furniture in Revolutionary Paris,” in a special issue of Art History 28, no. 1 (Spring 2005), ed. Katie Scott; “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review (October 2005); “Historians and Architectural History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 2006); “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; “Material Culture,” in Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Eds. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2012);and, “Afterword,”Material Culture of Difficult Histories, co-edited by Robert Ehrenreich, Caroline Sturdy Colls (Purdue: Purdue University Press, 2026).

My work on material culture, postcolonialism, and everyday politics in contemporary Europe includes three essays: "'Sambo' in Paris: Race and Racism in the Iconography of the Everyday," (coauthored 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, 2002); "Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Practices and the Postmodern European State," Cultural Dynamics 12/3 (2000): 183–209 and "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.

My thinking about diasporas and minority cultures brought me to research the intersection of Jewish history and material culture. Some early thoughts on those questions may be found in "'Jewish Taste'? Jews, and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942," in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar, 299–318 (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002). That reflection has taken a somewhat different turns in: "Resisting Context: The Spiritual Objects of Tobi Kahn," in Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn, ed. Emily Bilski, 71–78 (New York: Avoda/Hudson Hills, 2004); "Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris," Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 237–59; "The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural Practice Jewish?" Jewish Social Studies (Spr. 2009); "Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies" Unsettling Histories, eds. Alf Lüdtke and Sebastien Jobs (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010),127-146; "Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: From the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich,” Central European History 48 (2015): 300-33; "Translating Languages, Translating Cultures. A Story of two 20th century Renaissance Movements," with Thomas C. Holt in Romain Descendre and Jean-Louis Fournel, eds. Langages, politique, histoire: avec Jean-Claude Zancarini, (Lyon: ENS Éditions, coll. « Hors collection », 2015); “Jews and Material Culture,” in Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels, eds. Cambridge Modern Jewish History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017), 831-857; “What Makes a Jewish Country Home Jewish?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies,18/4 (2019): 466-288; “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; “Holocaust Lists and Inventories:  Recording Death vs. Traces of Lived Lives,” Jewish Quarterly Review (2021) 111.3. And, most recently, the introduction and my chapter, “The Many Lives of a Samovar,” in Domestic Diasporic: Jewish Experiences of Home (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026), co-edited with Federica Francesconi and Joshus Teplitsky).  

My work in the field of feminist history and gender studies includes Différence des sexes et protection sociale (XIXe–XXe siecles), a coedited 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): 158–76; "Do Women's + Feminist + Men's + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?" differences 9, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 1–30; Le genre de la nation. Fall 2000 issue of Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés on gender, citizenship, and the nation, coedited with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel; "Women's Suffrage, Citizenship Law and National Identity: Gendering the Nation-State in France and Germany,1871–1918," in Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake, 138–52 (London: Macmillan, 2001); "Gender at the Intersection of the Disciplines," Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks 2 (2006): 434–46; and an issue on "Judaïsme(s): genre et religion" for Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire 44 (2016), co-edited Sylvie Steinberg; and, “Françoise Basch: historienne de sa famille et historienne de la famille,” Françoise Basch, ed. Judith Friedlander et al/ (Paris: Editions Cyrséis, 2026), in press.

 

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