Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis invite faculty and graduate applications for 2026-2027 on “Ugly: Bodies, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Unpleasant,” directed by Professors Yesenia Barragan and Elaine LaFay, Department of History.
The 2026-2028 RCHA seminar interrogates what is socially deemed “unpleasant” and its relations to power, violence, and inequality. We do so through the critical social category of the “ugly” and “ugliness”; that is, as a contested aesthetic site shaped by dynamics of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, age, and body size.
Borrowing from feminist scholars Ela Przybylo and Sara Rodrigues, we are especially interested in understanding “ugliness” as a form of “visual injustice”—one that can have aural, olfactory, and other sensory modalities as well. In this seminar, we ask what is feared, dreaded, and shamed in what is normatively and socially prescribed as “ugly” and “unpleasant”? What are the historic relationships between social stratification, hierarchy, inequality, biopolitical power and visual appearance? How are these relations grounded in markers of social difference—race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, class, age, sexuality, ability, and/or size? How do these socially and historically constructed fears deepen or consolidate relations or infrastructures of power? How do we tell “ugly histories” that are accountable, liberatory, and do not reify the very categories we use?
We are especially interested in applications from scholars who are invested in activist approaches and/or commitments to these questions.
Drawing upon insights from history, anthropology, disability studies, psychology, Black studies, fat studies, queer and gender studies, architecture, and other humanistic and social science disciplines, this seminar seeks to bring together scholars to critique and interrogate what is socially deemed “ugly” and “ugliness” across different times and spaces. Ultimately, we aim to understand the relationship between aesthetics and power amid the “state of emergency” (Benjamin) that is our present.