Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her books and articles traverse several disciplines and interdisciplines, but one through-line is an abiding interest in exploring how feelings are lived, experienced, and communicated between and across bodies—and with what risks and possibilities for self and others.  Another is the value of the aesthetic for repairing democratic social life.

She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU Press, 2003; Beacon Press, 2004); and co-author, with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, of “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon Press, 2013).  “You Can Tell Just By Looking” was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction.  She has also published two anthologies: Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Danial Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press, 2003); and Secularisms, co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen (Duke University Press, 2008).  Pellegrini co-edits the “Sexual Cultures” Series, at New York University Press, with Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o.   She is also co-editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Psychoanalysis.  She’s currently completing a new book on “queer structures of religious feeling.” 

She enjoys psychoanalysis and show tunes, and is a candidate in adult psychoanalysis at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City.