Ann Pellegrini
Professor; Academic Director
Ann Pellegrini’s 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’s currently completing a new book on “queer structures of religious feeling.”
She enjoys psychoanalysis and show tunes.
Education
Harvard University
PhD 1994 - Cultural Studies
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Harvard University
Master of Arts 1992 - Study of Religion
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Oxford University
Bachelor of Arts 1988 - Literae Humaniores
Oxford, United Kingdom
Harvard-Radcliffe College
Bachelor of Arts 1986 - Classics
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Areas of Research/Interest
• RELIGION, SEXUALITY, AND U.S. PUBLIC LIFE
• PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURE
• TRAUMA STUDIES
• QUEER THEORY
• GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
• AFFECT STUDIES
• PERFORMANCE AND LAW
• CRITICAL THEORIES OF SECULARISM
• RELIGION AND BIOPOLITICS
• CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES
• JEWISH CULTURAL STUDIES