War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images.…[Read more]

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. I argue that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes…[Read more]

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and tel…[Read more]

Barack Obama oversaw an increase in the apprehension and deportation of almost three million undocumented immigrants, more than any other president so far. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president after repeatedly calling migrants “drug dealers,” “rapists,” and “criminals,” even though evidence shows that immigration correlates with lower crime…[Read more]

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways? In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a…[Read more]

Interview with Thomas Hill on The Library Cafe out of Vassar

Catalog essay for “Brotherville,” photographic exhibition by Farah Al Qasimi