Department Chair; Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature by courtesy
About
Scholarly Interests: photography theory; race and visual culture; critical prison studies, feminist theory, U.S. ethnic literatures
Ruby C. Tapia is Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and maintains a courtesy appointment in the Department of English . 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), co-editor of the University of California book series Reproductive Justice: New Visions for the 21st Century, 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. Check out her latest publications (creative non-fiction) in Avidly: a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books: "'Never Been a Scared Bitch'": On the Play of the Fight and 'Bruised' Notions of Gender, Violence, and Necessity" and "What I Was Looking for Was Green."
