Rosemary Hennessy joined the faculty at Rice in 2006 with an appointment as Professor in the Department of English. She served as Director for the Center of the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from 2006-2015, and chaired the department of English from 2015-2020. She received her Ph.D. in English from Syracuse University, her M.A. in English from Temple University, and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera (2013); Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (2000); Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993); the edited collections, NAFTA From Below: Maquiladora Workers, Campesinos, and Indigenous Communities Speak Out on the Impact of Free Trade in Mexico (with Martha Ojeda, 2007) and Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives (with Chrys Ingraham, 1997), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
Hennessy was North American Editor for the journal Feminist Theory. Among her awards are a Rockefeller Humanities Residency Fellowship and an NEH award on the History and Cultures of the Southwest.
Her selected recent publications include:
2020 “Toward an Ecology of Life-Making: The Re-membering of Meridel Le Sueur.” In The Politics of Social Reproduction, ed. Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel. Special Issue.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22.2 article 6. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol22/iss2/6
“Reading Violent Tales: Toward an Integral Materialist Feminist Approach.” Trans. Leena-Maija Rossi. In Sukupuoli ja väkivalta. Lukemisen etiikkaa ja politiikkaa (Gender and Violence. Ethics and Politics of Reading) Ed. Sanna Karkhuleto. SKS (Finnish Literature Society). Helsinki, Finland. (2017).
“Introduction” to the second edition of Profit and Pleasure. London and New York: Taylor and Francis. (2018).
“Feminism and Materialism: Keeping Capital in Focus.” In Materiality Revisited/ Rethinking Materiality: Feminist Interventions. Ed. Christine Löw and Katherina Volk. Frankfurt: Barbara Budrich Publishers. (2017): 95-116.
“Materialism” in Keywords for Radicals: A Late Capitalist Vocabulary of Culture and Society, ed. Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor. CITY A.K. Thompson. AK Press (2016). http://keywordsforradicals.net/
“Love in the Labyrinth.” In Red Love across the Pacific. Ed. Ruth Barraclough, Heather Bowen Struyk, and Paula Rabinowitz. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan (2015): 163-181.
“Open Secrets: Class, Affect, and Sexuality across the US-Mexico Border.” In The Material of World History. Ed. David Churchill and Tina Mai Chen. New York: Routledge (2015): 51-72.
“Thinking Sex Materially: Marxist, Socialist, and Related Feminist Approaches.” In The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory. Ed. Mary Evans et al. London: Sage (2014): 308-327.
“Bread and Roses in the Common.” In Love: A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Ann Ferguson and Anna Jonasdottir. New York: Routledge (2013): 265-78.
“Für eine politische Wertigkeit des Affekts: Marxistisch-feministische Notizen Affektive” (“Notes toward the Political Valence of Affect.” In Rahel Jaeggi and Daniel Loick (eds.): Gesellschaftskritik nach Marx. Philosophie, Ökonomie, politische Praxis. Berlin: Akademie (2013): 265-74.
Her research and teaching interests include feminist theory, sexuality studies, U.S.-Mexican studies, affect theory, and twentieth century American literature. Her current research project addresses the radical intimacies of women writers on the Left in the 1930s.