Kimberly Kay Lamm

Kimberly Kay Lamm is Associate Professor in the Program of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and Associate Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University's Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. She has held these positions since 2017 and 2024 respectively, contributing significantly to interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges literary studies, visual culture, and feminist theory.

Dr. Lamm earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2007. Her academic journey includes a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Women's Studies at Duke University (2009), a Junior Fellowship at the University of Iowa's Center of Ethnic Studies and the Arts (2008), and various research fellowships that have supported her scholarship.

Lamm's research brings together Anglophone literature, contemporary art, visual culture, and feminist theory with particular interest in feminist engagement with psychoanalysis, the role of language in feminism, and aesthetic practices like fashion that challenge femininity's devaluation. Her work centers on how women, particularly African American women, use sartorial self-fashioning as a language to address historical trauma and assert visibility. She explores how clothing functions as a 'second skin' that challenges essentialist notions of race and gender.

Her publications reveal a consistent trajectory examining feminist aesthetics across multiple media forms. Lamm's scholarship demonstrates how visual and textual representations of clothing, particularly in African American women's writing, serve as crucial sites for challenging racism and sexism. Her work spans experimental film, art criticism, literary analysis, and fashion studies, creating a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to feminist scholarship that connects historical contexts with contemporary concerns.

Among her notable honors are the Trinity Research Leave Award (2025), Society for the Humanities Research Fellowship from Cornell University (2020), and the Robert B. Cox Teaching Award from Duke University (2017). She has also received fellowships from Yale University's Beinecke Library and the Mellon-Frankin Humanities Institute.

Lamm is currently working on 'Fabricating Truths: Sartorial Self-Fashioning and the Legacies of Enslavement,' which examines how African American women writers from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century used portrayals of clothing to attest to the psychic impact of slavery's violence. This project, supported by a Cornell University research grant, explores how aesthetic representations of clothing challenge beliefs that race and gender can be located in the body's visible features.