Kimberly Kay Lamm
Associate Professor in the Program of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

My research fields include contemporary feminist art, contemporary poetry, feminist theory, and 19th- and 20th-century US Literature. I recently completed Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester University Press), an interdisciplinary project that brings the work of artists (Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly) and writers (Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey) together to argue that text and writing are crucial parts of women's art practices from the 1960s and 1970s.

I am currently working on a new book tentatively titled "Inheriting Letters of Exile." This project examines the artwork of Mona Hatoum, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Lorna Simpson produced in the 1980s and 1990s in relationship to the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the reading practices she sets forth in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

I have a long-standing research interest in the relations between contemporary poetry and feminist thought and am developing a book project that 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. This book, tentatively titled "A Sense of Arrangement" traces how these poets' engagement with the excesses of vision and sound aligns with current feminist scholarship on sound, affect, and sensation.

I am also interested in the place of clothing and fashion in African American cultural production. I recently published essays on the "soundsuits" of contemporary artist and choreographer Nick Cave; the attention to women's clothing in the documentary photography of Gordon Parks; and the "written garments" that appear in the fiction of Jessie Fauset. 

My research is drawn to the styles, objects, and practices that can be identified by through the term "femininity," which has led to my interest in girl cultures and fashion. I am a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and have 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 a number of contemporary artists.

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