Elena Creef
Professor of Women's and Gender Studies
Engaged in research on Asian American visual history, the New American West, and Native American horse cultures.
I came to Wellesley straight out of my PhD program in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1993 to develop courses in Asian American women's and gender studies—which remains my personal, intellectual, and theoretical passion.
My research and teaching have long engaged with questions of the representation of Asian American women from the silent film era to the pop culture phenomenon known as #AsianAugust 2018. My first two books, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (NYU Press, 2004) and Following Her Own Road: Miné Okubo (University of Washington Press 2008) focus on the gendered legacy of wartime Japanese American internment camp experience in art, culture, and historical American memory.
My most recent book Shadow Traces: Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photographic Archives (University of Illinois Press, 2022) examines visual archives of four groups of women from the early to mid-twentieth century in America. My analyses include photographs of indigenous Japanese Ainu women at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Japanese picture brides at the turn of the century, Japanese American Nisei women incarcerated during WWII, and at World War II Japanese war brides. My study builds a case for understanding the influential role of photographic archives in shaping Asian/American women’s history.
When people ask me, “What do you teach?” I enjoy confounding them with my long and eclectic list of courses that include everything from Elvis Presley, Techno-Orientalism, the WWII Japanese American Incarceration, Asian Women in Film, and Rainbow Cowboys and Cowgirls in the American West. I’m excited that in the Fall of 2024, I will be launching my last new course at Wellesley College--a feminist Animal Studies course on “Humans and Horses.”
These days, I literally follow the change of seasons according to the schedule of memorial Lakota and Dakota horse rides that take place at different times of the year. Since 2015, I’ve been privileged to support and participate on the annual rides to remember the tragic historical events at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, Mankato, Minnesota, and Whitestone Hill, North Dakota. My current project “36 Views of a Horse Nation” documents how the horse has been instrumental as a literal vehicle for healing from historical trauma. As a lifelong horsewoman, I have always understood their power and appeal.
Education
- B.A., University of California (Riverside)
- M.A., University of California (Santa Barbara)
- Ph.D., University of California (Santa Cruz)
Current and upcoming courses
Introduction to the interdisciplinary field of women's and gender studies with an emphasis on an understanding of the "common differences" that both unite and divide women. Beginning with an examination of how womanhood has been represented in myths, ads, and popular culture, the course explores how gender inequalities have been both explained and critiqued. The cultural meaning given to gender as it intersects with race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality will be studied. This course also exposes some of the critiques made by women's studies' scholars of the traditional academic disciplines and the new intellectual terrain currently being mapped.
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Equine cultural studies has become one of the most exciting fields to emerge out of Critical Animal Studies for how it looks at the intersection of humans and horses across histories, cultures, and the humanities. Some of the questions our course explores include: Did Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) inspire the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention Against Cruelty to Animals as well as the backlash against Victorian women’s corsets? Is there a feminist way to ride a horse? How does feminist thought offer a unique interrogation of race, flesh, and femaleness that sheds new light on equine studies? Have longstanding government programs and nonprofit rescue organizations helped or hindered the management of wild herds of horses? How has the horse been an integral partner in therapeutic healing in both Native and Indigenous communities as well as in non-Native communities? (ES 343 and WGST 343 are cross-listed courses.)
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Visual History and Memory: Representations of the Japanese American Incarceration Experience
WGST267
The Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II has always had a vexed relationship with the camera. Cameras and other recording devices were banned in the camps until spring 1943. This course engages with the legacy of this incarceration experience in visual culture and American historical memory. Using a gendered lens, we look at how the camps have been documented and remembered in photography, film, graphic memoir, camp newspapers, museum exhibitions, and new media since 1942. We will closely examine the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake, the intersection of internment camps and Indigenous lands, women filmmakers and activists, and explore major digital archives and recent augmented reality installations focusing on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.