Wendy Kozol

Professor of Comparative American Studies Wendy Kozol has published “‘Gonna Stomp some Rump’: Embodied Learning and the Politics of Pleasure in an American Studies Classroom” in American Studies Pedagogy: Resources for Teaching American Studies, ed. E. Duclos-Orsello, J. Entin, and R. Hill (University of Kansas Press, 2021). Featuring an impromptu moment in CAST 100 when she made all the students dance, this article explores embodied learning as a pedagogical practice that can foster student interrogations about how power, inequality, and difference operate both in the classroom and beyond.  

Professor of Comparative American Studies Wendy Kozol presented “Ethical Spectatorship: Looking at Hard Histories” as part of a panel sponsored by Yale University Art Gallery and the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning on April 28. The panel, “Reckoning with the Record: Ethical Spectatorship and Teaching Hard Histories,” discussed challenges and approaches to teaching from sources that tell the stories of trauma or racial and other inequities.

Professor of Comparative American Studies Wendy Kozol wrote a piece for Reading the Pictures about the visual display of militarized force used against peaceful demonstrators.

Professor of Comparative American Studies Wendy Kozol wrote an op-ed "The Disappearing Island: Censorship at Guantánamo Bay" for the blog, Reading the Pictures.

Professor of Comparative American Studies Wendy Kozol published the op-ed "Photography Challenge: Straddling Female Stereotypes as Women Become Marines" on the website Reading the Pictures.  

Professor of Comparative American Studies Wendy Kozol published the paper "Radical Plurality and Visual Witnessing."

Wendy Kozol, professor and director of the comparative American studies program, and Rebecca A. Adelman ’01 have published “Ornamenting the Unthinkable: Visualizing Survival under Occupation” in a spring/summer 2016 Women’s Studies Quarterly special issue on survival (pgs. 171-187).

Confronting survival in visual cultures of war often requires departing from ideological absolutes (for sometimes the work of survival is ugly) and fantasies about resistance (for sometimes the work of survival is primarily utilitarian). Instead, this visual departure opens up alternative critical, political, and spectatorial possibilities. This article considers the interweaving of survival, catastrophe, and ordinariness in the needlepoint artwork of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz to illustrate this potential. Krinitz, who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, juxtaposes the luscious materiality and pastoral settings of 36 fabric collage and embroidered panels with a visual narrative of surviving genocidal violence. Arresting both for its virtuosic level of detail and frank rendition of the occupation and attendant traumas, Krinitz’s needlework ornaments the conjunction of the horrific and the quotidian. This jarring combination confronts viewers even as the haptic richness and sensory elegance of her craft pulls us toward spectatorial pleasures.

Rebecca Adelmann is associate professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, specializing in visual culture, political theory, trauma studies, ethics, and cultural studies of war, terrorism, and militarization.

Wendy Kozol’s new book, “Visible Wars and the Ambivalences of Witnessing,” was published by the University of Minnesota Press in fall 2014. This study brings a new perspective to enduring concerns about the efficacy of conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy. In the 21st century, visuality has been a pivotal technology in U.S. militarism, as well as in critiques of the nation at war. This book analyzes both mainstream media and alternative visual projects to understand how representations of the U.S. at war navigate in, through, and around national security logics. Visual witnessing, she argues, often remains bound up in national security agendas even as it may stretch beyond those agendas into other terrains of possibility.

For the past two years, Wendy has also been working with a former student, Rebecca Adelman (OC ’01) on a new project titled “The War In Between.” Their first publication appeared this fall: “Banality: Discordant Affects and the Ethics of Spectatorship.” Theory & Event, vol. 17, issue 3 (2014).

Wendy also published two other articles this fall: “Witnessing Genocide and the Challenges of Ethical Spectatorship,” Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, eds. S. Brophy and J. Hladki (U Toronto P); and “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 (I.B. Tauris).