Ruby Tapia

Scholarly Interests: photography theory; race and visual culture; critical prison studies, feminist theory, U.S. ethnic literatures

Ruby C. Tapia is Chair of Women's and Gender Studies and Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies. Her work engages the intersections of photography theory, feminist and critical race theory, and critical prison studies. She is co-editor of Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States (University of California, 2010) and author of American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal (University of Minnesota, 2011). Her current book project, The Camera in the Cage (forthcoming, Fordham University Press), interrogates the intersections of prison photography and carceral humanism and puts forth an argument and methodology for abolitionist aesthetics. Her courses include "Carceral Visualities,” "Gender, Race, and Incarceration," and "The Prison in Literature, Photography, and the Moving Image." She has facilitated creative writing workshops via the Prison Creative Arts Project at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Michigan, is a member of the Theory Group Think Tank at Macomb Correctional Facility for men, and is the lead faculty member of the Critical Carceral Visualities component of the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project at UM's Humanities Collaboratory.