Jennie Kassanoff

Jennie Kassanoff is the Adolph S. and Effie Ochs Professor of American Studies and History and a Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University where she teaches American Studies and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Originally from Dallas, Texas, her essays on voting rights, gerrymandering, race and disability have appeared in PMLA, American Literature, J19, and American Literary History, among other books and journals. She is the author of Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge UP, 2004) and is currently completing a new book entitled Voter Writes: A Literary History of the Voting Rights Act.

Voter Writes examines the electoral imaginary that has shaped American politics. In a discursive account covering two centuries, the book argues that literary accounts of the ballot, placed in dialogue with court opinions, local journalism, visual culture, and congressional testimony, reveal the narratives of gender, race, invisibility and embodiment that underwrite voter restriction. With particular attention to the unfinished business of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which briefly gave Black men the right to vote after the Civil War, the book sees the imperative to preserve the “purity of the ballot box” as a metaphor that has historically bound U.S. electoral practices to a set of racialized and gendered fantasies of privacy, invisibility, disembodiment, and sentimental intent. In surfacing and critiquing these fantasies, Voter Writes seeks to envision a sustainable anti-purity politics that can flourish amid historical contingency, lived ambiguity and entangled solidarity – components of an imperfect but needful practice of democratic pluralism.