Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography

Elizabeth Abel is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work spans two broad fields of inquiry. The first is gender theory, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction (with a focus on Virginia Woolf). The second is race, cultural studies, and visuality. Most recently, she has published Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (2010), which charts the cultural history of segregation signs through their mediation by photography. Her current project examines maternal elegies in the twentieth century.