Paula Rabinowitz

Professor and Chair

Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities

Ph.D. American Culture, University of Michigan, 1986

225A Lind Hall
(612) 625-2063
rabin001@umn.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Paula Rabinowitz's research, teaching and training are in the areas of American materialist feminist cultural studies. Her work considers the interlocking roles of cinema, photography, painting in and through twentieth century literature. She focuses on contemporary and modernist American women’s art and literature; her work explores hidden histories within working-class, pulp and popular cultures. Her articles and chapters on literary radicalism and film theory appear in many journals, anthologies and encyclopedia, such as the Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, Encyclopedia of Documentary Film (Routledge), Modernism, Inc. (NYU); recent essays on art and culture have appeared in NY Arts, PAJ, Social Text, Legacy, Cineaste, Film International, Women’s Studies Quarterly, T/Here and have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Chinese. Between 2003 and 2006, she was Project Director of VG/Voices from the Gaps, an award-winning international website on the Art and Writing of North American Women of Color comprised of student and professional writing. She has also co-curated gallery exhibits on women and pulp fiction and on women’s sound installation art. Her ongoing book projects: "The Demotic Ulysses: How Pulp Fiction Brought Modernism to America" explores the impact of the paperback revolution on censorship, sexuality, audiences and literary taste; "Frida, Miss O'Keefe and M.E.: Fragments on Modernist Women Painters" looks at the reputations of three North American women whose works and lives forged a complex nexus between nationalism, feminism and modernism; "The Times of Space: Women's Installations" charts women's time-based art since the 1970's.

Department Affiliations

English; American Studies; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Critical Studies in Discourse and Society

Areas of Expertise

American women writers; working-class literature; U.S. literary radicalism; marxist and feminist theories; film, photograpy, media; cultural studies; modernisms

Selected Publications

Black & White and Noir: America's Pulp Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. New York, London: Verso, 1994.

Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. Ed., with Charlotte Nekola.

“Slips of the Tongue: Lessons in Dressing as a Lesbian from Pulp Fiction.” Abito e Identitá. Ed. Cristina Giorcelli. v.7. Palermo: Ila Palma Editore, 2007.

“Pulping Ann Petry: The Case of Country Place.” Ed. Alex Lubin. Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left. University of Mississippi Press. 2007.

“Social Representations within American Modernism,” Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Ed. Walter Kalaidjian. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

"Great Lady Painters, Inc: Feminism, Modernism, Nationalism and Painting," Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. Eds. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

“Designing Women/Modernist Identities: Some thoughts on Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo and Emily Carr,” T/Here: Journal of Architecture and Landscape 3 (2006).

“Plainsong: The Video of Mary Lucier,” Border Crossings: A Magazine of the Arts 24:2 (2005).

Graduate Courses

American Modernisms and the Subjects of Modernity
From Marginality to Digitality: Pedagogy, Media, Multiculturalism
Documentary Rhetoric
Girls v. Marx: Materialist-Feminist Cultural Theory
Marxism and the Politics of Culture in Depression America,
Desire and Destruction: Film as Cultural Theory
Writing for Publication

Undergraduate Courses

Feminist Film Theory and Practice
Film Noir:Bad Girls/Doomed Guys
Old Left/New Left/What’s Left?
U.S. Literary Radicalism
Documenting the Depression
Killer Women: From Medea to Monster
Political Pulp
Multicultural American Literature
Working in the U.S.A.: Representations of Labor in Art and Literature