Wendy Kozol

  • Professor Emeritus of Comparative American Studies

Education

  • PhD, University of Minnesota—Minneapolis, 1990
  • MA, University of California—Los Angeles, 1986
  • BA, Oberlin College, 1980

Biography

Wendy Kozol is Emeritus Professor of Comparative American Studies. She taught at Oberlin for 30 years, almost fifteen of them in CAS. 

Her research interests include visual cultures of war and human rights, critical military studies, and feminist theories and methodologies. Her most recent book, The War In-Between: Indexing a Visual Culture of Survival (Fordham UP, 2024) studies visual artifacts that provide different vantage points on the quotidian impacts of militarism, whether it is the banality of everyday violence for non-combatants or the daily struggles of soldiers living with physical and emotional trauma.

Books

The War In-Between: Indexing a Visual Culture of Survival. New York: Fordham University Press, 2024.

Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 

Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol, eds. Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 

Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol, eds. Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real." Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Life's America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.

Articles and Book Chapters

“Visualizing the Scars of War: Sexual Trauma, Temporality, and Post-Conflict Photography.” In Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding, Tom Allbeson, Pippa Oldfield, and Jolyon Mitchell, eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2025.

“‘Gonna Stomp some Rump’: Embodied Learning and the Politics of Pleasure in an American Studies Classroom.” In Teaching American Studies: State of the Classroom as State of the Field, ed. E. Duclos-Orsello, J. Entin, and R. Hill, 187-197. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2021.

“Radical Plurality and Visual Witnessing.” Forum on John Hariman, Explorations in Media Ecology 17, 4 (2018): 475-478.

Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol, “Unremarkable Suffering: Banality, Spectatorship, and War’s In/visibilities.” In In/Visible War: America’s 21st Century Armed Conflicts, eds. Jon Simon and Jon Lucaites, 89-109. Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2017.

Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol, “Ornamenting the Unthinkable: Visualizing Survival Under Occupation,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, special issue on survival, 44, 1&2 (Spring/Summer 2016): 171-187.

Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol. “Discordant Affects: Ambivalence, Banality, and the Ethics of Spectatorship.” Theory & Event 17, 3 (Fall 2014). 

“Witnessing Precarity: Photojournalism, Women’s/Human/Rights, and the War in Afghanistan.” In The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick, 193-210. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014.

“Witnessing Genocide and the Challenges of Ethical Spectatorship.” In Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, eds. Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki, 209-224. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.

“Battlefield Souvenirs and the Affective Politics of Recoil.” Photography & Culture 5, 1 (March 2012): 21-36.

“Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco’s Palestine.” In Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, eds. E. Goldberg and A. Schultheis Moore, 165-179. New York: Routledge, 2011. 

“Looking Elsewhere.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 11, 2 (August 2011).  http://reconstruction.eserver.org/

“Visual Witnessing and Women's Human Rights.” Peace Review 20, 1 (January 2008): 67–75.

Wendy Kozol and Rebecca DeCola. “Remapping the Visual War on Terrorism: Citizenship and its Transnational Others.” In Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the "War on Terror,eds. Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro, 179-205. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Spring 2006.

“Miss Indian America: Regulatory Gazes and the Politics of Affiliation.” Feminist Studies 31.1 (Spring 2005): 64-94. 

“Domesticating NATO’s War in Kosovo: (In)Visible Bodies and the Dilemma of Photojournalism.” Meridians: feminism, transnationalism, race 4.2 (2004): 1-38. 

"Relocating Citizenship in Photographs of Japanese Americans During World War II." In Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real," ed. W. Hesford and W. Kozol, 217-250. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

"Gazing at Race in the Pages of Life: Picturing Segregation through Theory and History." In Looking at Life: Rethinking America's Favorite Magazine, 1936-1972, ed. Erika Doss, 159-175. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 2001.

"Can Feminist Pedagogy Find a Safe Space? White Defensiveness and the Politics of Silence." Concerns: The Journal of the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages Association 26,1-2 (Spring/Summer 1999): 10-20.

"’Good Americans’: Nationalism and Domesticity in Life Magazine, 1945-1960." In Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar, 231-250. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Chapter reprinted: 

Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People, ed. Ardis Cameron, 173-211. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Rhetorical Visions: Writing and Reading in a Visual Culture, ed. Wendy Hesford and Brenda J. Brueggemann, 177-201. Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2005.

"Fracturing Domesticity: Media, Nationalism, and the Question of Feminist Influence." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20.3 (Spring 1995): 646-667.

"Representation of Race in Network News Coverage of South Africa." In Television Studies: Textual Analysis, eds. Gary Burns and Robert Thompson, 165-182. New York: Praeger Press, 1989.

"Madonnas of the Fields: Photography, Gender and 1930s Farm Relief." Genders 2 (Summer 1988): 1-26.

Reprinted in Feminist Cultural Studies, ed. T. Lovell. Brookfield, Vt.: Elgar, 1995, vol. 2. 

  • Introduction to Comparative American Studies - CAST 100
  • Visible Bodies and the Politics of Sexuality - CAST 202
  • American Identities and Popular Culture - CAST 209
  • Debating Citizenship - CAST 235
  • Living with the Bomb - CAST/EAS 241
  • Surveillance Cultures - CAST 312
  • Research Seminar: Expanding the Archive - CAST 400
  • Picturing War - CAST 407
  • Honors Seminar - CAST 501/502

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