Paula Rabinowitz
Collection
Paula Rabinowitz’s research and teaching are in the areas of American materialist feminist cultural studies. Her work considers the interlocking roles of cinema, photography, painting and material culture in and through twentieth-century literature. She focuses on contemporary and modernist American women’s art and literature; her work explores hidden histories within working-class, pulp and popular cultures.
Paula donated her collection of over 2000 books, feminist journals, poetry chapbooks, pamphlets, , and other materials to the East Side Freedom Library (ESFL) in 2016 when she retired from the University of Minnesota’s English Department . They are organized around the evolution of feminist thought, especially literary and film theory. Her books also include many classics from the second wave women’s movement of the 1960s-1980s.
Paula was born on December 25, 1951 in Brooklyn to Samuel and Shirley Rabinowitz. Paula’s father worked for ARPA (now DARPA) Project Defender (Defense against ballistic missiles) at the Pentagon. The family traveled extensively around the United States, and she attended school at the University of California, Berkeley, during the years of regular student strikes (1969-71) against the Vietnam War. She ended up attending Brandeis University in Waltham MA, graduating with a BA in 1974.
In 1978 she married activist theater director and actor, David Bernstein, who was starting The Attic Theater in Detroit and later founded another theater in Ann Arbor. They had two sons, David and Raphael.
After being turned down for work at a Ford factory, she applied and was accepted to the University of Michigan’s American Cultural Doctoral program. She received her Master of Arts in 1980 and her PhD in 1986. While a student, she also worked on a feminist collective’s magazine, began a performance space and wrote poetry, which earned her the University’s Hopwood Award. Her dissertation, “Female Subjectivity in Women’s Revolutionary Novels of the 1930s,” won the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize, awarded to the best doctoral dissertation in American Studies, Ethnic Studies or Women’s Studies. She applied for a position in feminist theory and women’s and minority literature at the University of Minnesota’s Department of English and was hired in 1987.
Paula was an active writer and editor while she taught. Some of her early books include Labor & Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (1991); They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (1994); Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940), Co-edited with Charlotte Nekola (1993) with a foreword by Toni Morrison. She is co-editor with Cristina Giorcelli of Habits Of Being, a four-volume series of essay on clothing, fashion, dress and identity; and co-editor, with Ruth Barraclough and Heather Bowen-Stryuk of Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century.
She also became very interested in pulp fiction and wrote two books on the subject: Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism, 2002; and American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, 2014, which won the George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). The University of Minnesota Libraries Special Collections is archiving her extensive pulp collection. She has also co-curated gallery exhibits on women and pulp fiction, women’s sound installation art and feminist film.
Paula also served as Department of English chair, director of graduate studies (for both English and American Studies), American Studies director of undergraduate studies, and member and chair of numerous committees at department, college, and University levels. Within the College of Liberal Arts (CLA), she has been named a Dean’s Medal recipient, Scholar of the College, and Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities. She was elected to both the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council and the American Studies Association’s National Board.
Her classes were wide-ranging, including Clothing, Dress and Fashion in American Film and Literature; Girls vs. Marx, Materialist-Feminist Cultural Theory; Film Noir:Bad Girls/Doomed Guys; Working in the U.S.A.: Representations of Labor in Art and Literature and many more.
Paula garnered `a number of awards and honors while on the faculty including: Mellon fellowship Wesleyan University in 1990-91; Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Rome, 1997; Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy 2000; Senior Fellow, Oregon State University, Center for the Humanities 2000-2001; Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in American Cultures, East China Normal University, Shanghai; Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney, 2016.
She has been Editor-In Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature since 2014. She solicits editors and commissions authors for the hundreds of substantial essays that will consolidate Oxford University’s treasure trove of original manuscripts, critical scholarship, encyclopedias, the OED, etc., into “the scholarly answer to Wikipedia.” Julia Kostova, senior editor at Oxford, said that she selected Paula primarily for the breadth of her interests.
After nearly 30 years at the University of Minnesota, Paula retired in 2016 and she and David moved back to New York City. David died in 2020. In an English Department article written about Paula when she retired the author noted that she was leaving behind a “striking record of scholarship, teaching, and service.”
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