Leah DeVun

Leah DeVun is an American contemporary artist and historian who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA and PhD from Columbia University and is a Professor¹ at Rutgers University,² where she teaches women's and gender history. She serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

DeVun's photography work explores queer and feminist histories. Her artwork has been featured in Artforum,³ Huffington Post,⁴ Art Papers,⁵ Hyperallergic,⁶ Modern Painters,⁷ and New York magazine.

Her exhibition entitled "Our Hands on Each Other"⁸ present photographs documenting the landscapes of rural lesbian communes.⁹ She also explores feminist legacies in her work with a special interest in queer and gendered communities, fashion and fandom, memory, politics, and identity. The exhibition opens questions about womanhood, feminism and queerness as explored in rural Mississippi.¹⁰

In the publication "Radical History Review," the work of Leah DeVun is discussed in detail in an article entitled "Archives Behaving Badly."¹¹ The text discusses the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and includes images of DeVun's work from the 2012 exhibition titled Latent Images.

She is the author of the book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time¹² published by Columbia University Press in 2009. She also write the book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021), which received the 2023 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, awarded by the History of Science Society.¹³¹⁴