Anne Gray Fischer

PhD - History
Brown University - 2018

MFA - Creative Nonfiction
Emerson College - 2010

BA - Slavic Languages and Literature
University of Chicago - 2004

 “Bad, Mad, or Both: A Legal History of Battered Woman Syndrome," Gender & History, “Engendering Carcerality” special issue, forthcoming, October 2024. 2024 - publications

The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).  2022 - publications

“‘The Place is Gone!’: Policing Black Women to Redevelop Downtown Boston,” in “Social Histories of Neoliberalism,” a special issue of the Journal of Social History, 53, no. 1 (Fall 2019), 7-26. 2019 - publications

“‘Land of the White Hunter’: Legal Liberalism and the Racial Politics of Morals Enforcement in Midcentury Los Angeles,” Journal of American History, Volume 105, Issue 4, March 2019, Pages 868–884.  2019 - publications

Victor Worsfold Outstanding Faculty of the Year - University of Texas at Dallas [2021]

I will be on leave during Fall 2026 as an ACLS Faculty Fellow. 

I am a historian of the twentieth-century United States. My research and teaching explore histories of gender, sexuality, and race; law enforcement and the state; and feminist activisms in the modern United States. My first book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, is a history of sexual policing between Prohibition and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s. My second project, Going Ballistic: A Concealed History of Feminism and Guns, traces the genealogy of women’s gun politics from the armed feminist Left of the 1970s to the contemporary Second Amendment mobilization. Going Ballistic has been supported by a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Princeton University and an ACLS Faculty Fellowship. 

In my classroom, I hope to kindle a sense of the excitement and relevance of historical work. I encourage students to seek out hidden histories and to ask how they connect to contemporary events and conditions. Practicing historical curiosity does not just enrich our everyday lives; students will also develop a toolkit for critical inquiry and communication that is readily transferable from the classroom to their future careers.

I strive to cultivate a sense of institutional and intellectual belonging so that students feel empowered to claim their identities as both responsible scholars of the present and engaged historical actors of the future. You are always welcome to visit me during office hours, or email me to make an appointment.
Before joining the faculty at UT Dallas, I taught at Indiana University. When I'm not working, I love to read and take my dog for long walks around White Rock Lake.