Dora Apel

As a cultural critic and art historian, Dora Apel has authored six books on trauma, gender, race, and national identity, including Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing, on representations of the Holocaust by the second generation, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob, on the representation of racial oppression across the twentieth century; War Culture and the Contest of Images, on the political uses of war photography; Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, on the cultural representation of urban ruins and their significance for poor and Black urban populations, and Calling Memory into Place, on monuments, memorials, and the embodiment of the past in the present.

She has also written about the representation of refugees and migrants in the edited volumes Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film; Art and Media and in Terrorism and the Arts: Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production, on the poisoning or cutoff of water in the majority Black cities of Flint and Detroit in The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries and on Black urban spaces in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Deindustrialization Studies, as well as essays in numerous journals. She is the W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University.