Kimberly Lamm

Kimberly is an Associate Professor in the Program of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Duke University. She has a PhD from University of Washington, 2007, an MA from University of Washington, 1998, and a BA from University of Washington, 1992, Magna Cum Laude. Her research fields include contemporary feminist art, contemporary poetry, feminist theory, and 19th- and 20th-century US Literature. She has published essays on a wide range of topics, from African-American visual culture to American poetry’s relationship to feminist theory. Her recent publications include: Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing, 2018, and The Sense of an Arrangement: Feminist Aesthetics in Contemporary Poetry, 2011. The first analyzes the work of feminist artists who bring together images and the textual appearance of language in unpredictable configurations. 

Kimberly argues that this choice draws attention to the image as a site of affective labor, but also creates what she calls a poetics of address, a call to viewers to become feminist readers of visual culture. The Sense of an Arrangement: Feminist Aesthetics in Contemporary Poetry represents her long-standing research on the relations between contemporary poetry and feminist thought. It analyzes the work of five poets—Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Rosemarie Waldrop, and Claudia Rankine—who have contributed substantially to the field of contemporary poetry and women’s place within it. The book traces how these poets’ engagement with the excesses of vision and sound aligns with current feminist scholarship on sound, affect, and sensation. Increasingly, her research is drawn to the styles, objects, and practices that can be identified by through the term “femininity,” which has led to her interest in girl cultures and fashion.

An essay on the depiction of fashionable clothing in the work Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Fauset is forthcoming in the collection Crossings in Text and Textile, 1818-1934 (University Press of New England). She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and has published art criticism in The Brooklyn Rail, curated exhibitions of contemporary art (most notably, “Imaginary Arsenals” for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and written catalog essays for contemporary artists Matthew Buckingham and Renata Poljak.

In addition to a special issue of Public Art Dialogue titled "Outside Voices: Art, Visibility, and the Gender of Public Speech," Kimberly Lamm completed two books in 2023: Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labour to the Affective Labour of the Image (forthcoming with Punctum) and Riddles of the Sphinx, a BFI Classics book. She is currently working on an edited collection devoted to the work of Laura Mulvey and a monograph titled "Words and Clothes: Sartorial Self-Fashioning and the Legacies of Enslavement."

Recent Conference papers:

Lamm, K. 2015. Fashionable clothing, segregation, and the counter-archive in the photographs of Gordon Parks. Paper presented at the Archival Addresses: Photographies, Practices, Positionalities platform, VIADUCT 2015, VIAD Research Centre, FADA, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, 18-20 March.

Research and Teaching Collaborations:

Seminar Leader, with Robyn Wiegman, Feminist Theory Workshop, Women’s Studies,Duke University, March 2012

Seminar Leader, with Kari Weil, Feminist Theory Workshop, Women’s Studies, Duke University, March 2011

Grants and Awards:

Edith and Richard French Visiting Research Fellowship, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, 2013-2014

Franklin Humanities Institute, Mellon Manuscript Completion Workshop, 2013

Junior Fellow, Women of Color in Popular Culture; University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts, 2008

Special Issue:

Ed.,Texting Girls: Images, Words, and Sounds in Neoliberal Cultures of Femininity Women & Performance, forthcoming 2016

Essays in Journals:

“Between the Open and the Hidden: Clothing, Segregation, and the Feminine Counter- Archive in the Photographs of Gordon Parks.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural, Media Studies, forthcoming 2016.

“Texting Girls: Images, Words, and Sounds in Neoliberal Cultures of Femininity,” Introduction, Women & Performance, forthcoming 2016.

“Modern Spectacles and American Feminism’s Disappointing Daughters: Writing Fantasy Echoes in The Portrait of a Lady.”  Special Issue on Joan Scott and “Fantasy Echo.” Feminist Theory 15.2 (2014): 179-196.

“A Future for Isabel Archer: Jamesian Feminism, Leo Bersani, and Aesthetic Subjectivity.” The Henry James Review 32 (2011): 249-258.

“At the Pivot of the Biopolitical: Seeing Sex and Racism in Lorna Simpson’s You’re Fine.” n.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal Vol. 28 (July 2011): 88-93.

Essays in Collections:

“Gestures of Inclusion, Bodily Damage, and the Hauntings of Exploitation in Global Feminisms.” Feminist Art Histories: Renewing Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice. Eds. Victoria Horne and Lara Perry, I.B. Tauris, forthcoming 2016.

“The Tender Buttons of Avant-Garde Self-Assertion: Teaching Gertrude Stein’s Feminism.” Approaches to Teaching Gertrude Stein.  Eds. Deborah Mix Logan Esdale, Modern Language Association. forthcoming 2016.

“The Midwife’s Clothing: Jessie Fauset In and Out of Fashion.” Crossings in Textand Textile. Edd. Katherine Joslin and Daneen Wadrop. University Press of New England: 2015. 179-196