I’m Allison Lange, and I’m a historian who explores the stories that pictures tell about the intersection of gender and power in US history. I write, give talks, teach, and curate exhibitions. Our image-saturated world and the legacy of historical images in it fascinates me. For me, Instagram isn’t just a social media site, it’s a research database.

My first book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on the ways that women’s voting rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power. My next book situates current iconic pictures within the context of historical ones to demonstrate that today’s visual debates about gender and politics are shaped by those of the past.

I write for publications including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Imprint. I also provide interviews for media sites like The New York Times, TIME, and USA Today and podcasts like American Girls and And Nothing Less hosted by Retta and Rosario Dawson.

I value opportunities to share my research with the public. Currently, I’m an associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. I am also creating the first series on American women’s history for The Great Courses. For the 19th Amendment centennial, I served as Historian for the United States Congress’s Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. I curated exhibitions at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library as well as a website for Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures called Truth Be Told: Stories of Black Women’s Fight for the Vote.

Various institutions have supported my work, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Library of Congress. Most recently, I won a fellowship from the Université Gustave Eiffel and am looking forward to teaching in Paris, where I will eat lots of fine pastries.