Anne Gessler, Ph.D.

Biography

Anne Gessler is the director of the First-Year Seminar Program and a clinical associate professor in the Humanities program. She teaches across these disciplines, including women’s and gender studies and history. She is also the coordinator of the Common Reader Program. 

She received her doctorate in American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Her teaching interests include social movement history, women's and gender studies, media studies, animal studies, food studies, and Utopian studies.

Gessler’s book, "Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development (University Press of Mississippi, June 2020)," is a cultural history of the cooperatives driving New Orleans’s development. Drawing on archives and interviews with grassroots activists from the 1890s to today, it contends that sustained socializing among laborers, women, immigrants, and people of color propelled a neighborhood-focused, globally inspired cooperative movement that has democratized New Orleans’s economic and political institutions.  

Engaging with women’s and gender studies, social movement history, and southern Jewish history, Gessler’s next project examines coalition-building among Jewish and non-Jewish New Orleanian women community advocates striving to professionalize public health and social work fields. She has also published in Utopian Studies, American Studies in Scandinavia, Radio Journal, Journal of Southern History, and Feminist Media Studies.