Banned Books Project

Terri Conley grew up in a small town in Indiana before attending the University of Wisconsin for her undergraduate studies and UCLA to obtain her doctoral degree in social psychology. She is now Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include a) gender differences in sexuality--with a particular emphasis on the role that orgasm plays in explaining those differences; b) irrational judgments of risk and mechanisms by which risk assessments can be made more consistent and c) the antecedents and consequences of nescience (the belief that there is no objective truth, or that the truth is not knowable) and truth relativism. She teaches courses in gender and sexuality and research methods.

Finn Enke grew up on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan attuned to the ever-changing meeting places of land, water and sky. Their artistic imagination revolves around creation, destructionand the interplay of visible and nonvisible aspects of embodiment and the environment. How, in the face of violence and loss, do we stay open to love and connection with all that is? How, when capitalism and fear make a mockery of all that sustains life, do we embrace transformation and the unknown?

Enke is professor of history and gender studies at University of Wisconsin. They are currently finishing a graphic memoir, With Finn and Wing :Archive of an Amphibious Childhood in a Nuclear Age, and a comics collection, Pedagogies of the Impossible: From the Trans on Campus Corpus. Enke is author of Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (2007) and editor of the award-winning essay collection, Transfeminist Perspectives Within and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (2012).

Kim F. Hall is Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College where she teaches courses in Early Modern Studies, Critical Race Studies, Black Feminist Studies, and material culture. She publishes on questions of race in the early modern period and her first book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, helped create the field known as Premodern Critical Race Studies. Her current book, Sweet Taste of Empire: Gender, Pleasure and Mastery in the Early Modern AngloCaribbean will appear with UPenn Press in 2025. She has taught and lectured widely on questions of race and culture to everyone from Black sororities to middle and high school teachers to college faculty. Diverse Issues in Higher Education named her one of “25 Women Making a Difference in Higher Education and Beyond” and she was the Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe. She is also a quilter and has taught art practices in programs for placed-at-risk students, quilt guilds, and senior citizens.

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Center for the Study of Sexuality. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. She was born in Romania, and educated at Brown University where she received her BA/MA andPh.D. degrees.

Hirsch’s work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (University of Washington Press, 2020), and the co-edited volumes Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (Steidl, 2020) and Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). Along with a group of local scholars, artists and activists, Hirsch is currently co-directing the Zip Code Memory Project, an initiative that seeks to find art and community-based ways to repair the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.

Jennifer L. Morgan is a historian deepening understanding of how the system of race-based slavery developed in early America. Using a range of archival materials—and what is missing from them—Morgan brings to light enslaved African women’s experiences during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She shows that exploitation of enslaved women was central to the economic and ideological foundations of slavery in the Atlantic world. 

Morgan wrote her groundbreaking first book, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), at a time when most scholarship focused on the transport, labor, and resistance of enslaved men. In her second book, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2021), Morgan examines the development of accounting practices that transformed enslaved people into commodities within a system of trade. Morgan is currently at work on The Eve of Slavery—a book about African women in seventeenth-century North America. Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day

Tahneer Oksman (she/her) is a writer, teacher, and scholar. Her interests revolve around Memoir Studies; Comics & Visual Culture; Literary Journalism; Contemporary Jewish American Literature; Feminist Literature & Theory; and Writing Studies, including Digital and Transmedia Literacies.Tahneer is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Language, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Media Arts at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, where she teaches classes in writing, literature and comics, and journalism. She regularly delivers talks for academic and public audiences on her topics of interest.

She is author of "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”:  Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), co-editor of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), and co-editor, with her mentor and friend Nancy K. Miller, of a book of mostly first-person essays, Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology (SUNY Press, 2023). She is also co-editor of a multi-disciplinary Special Issue of Shofar: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, titled “What’s Jewish About Death?” (March 2021), and she is currently co-editing, once again with Nancy, a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, titled, “Living with/chronic illness."

Marc Stein is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of U.S. History and Constitutional Law at San Francisco State University. He is the author of five books on LGBTQ history, including The Stonewall Riots (2019), Queer Public History (2022), and Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (2023). Stein is also director of the OutHistory website, coeditor of the Queer Pasts digital history database, and vice president of the Organization of American Historians.

As a scholar of comparative U.S. ethnic studies, Ruby C. Tapia's work treats the intersections of photography theory, feminist and critical race theory and critical prison studies. She is co-editor of Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States (University ofCalifornia, 2010), co-editor of the University of California book series Reproductive Justice: New Visions for the 21st Century, and author of American Pietàs: Visionsof Race, Death and the Maternal (University of Minnesota, 2011). Her current book project, The Camera in the Cage (forthcoming, Fordham University Press), interrogates the intersections of prison photography and carceral humanism and puts forth an argument and methodology for abolitionist aesthetics. She has facilitated creative writing workshops via the Prison Creative Arts Project at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Michigan, is a member of the Theory Group Think Tank at Macomb Correctional Facility for men and remains the lead faculty member of the Critical Carceral Visualities component of the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project founded and supported by grants from the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Tapia also writes creative non-fiction, and you can read some of her more recent work online at Avidly, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Ruby was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, home to some of the nation’s historically most decorated boxers–a relevant detail because Ruby spends her free-time training as an amateur U.S.A. masters boxer.