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Dora Apel (born January 22, 1952)[1] is an American art historian, cultural critic, author, and W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art[2] at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she taught from 1994 to 2019. Her work focuses on issues of trauma, memory, race, gender, national identity, war, and the negative impacts of capitalism. Her book, Calling Memory into Place, includes essays that delineate her family's history during and after the Holocaust.[3] Two of her books address the history of lynching black people in the United States.[4][5]
Apel was born on January 22, 1952, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents are Samuel and Ethel (Ajzenkrantz) Apel.[1] In 1974, Apel received double degrees from the State University of New York Binghamton: B.A. Anthropology and B.A. Studio Art. She followed with a M.A. in History of Art, from Wayne State University, in 1989.[1] She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Ph.D. Certificate in Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995.[2]
Her books have been reviewed at length in various publications.[3][5][6][7] A review published in PopMatters points out that her first book, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (2002), explored the work of artists who chose the Holocaust as their topic although they did not personally experience it, whereas Calling Memory into Place (2020) used her own family's Holocaust-related experiences during and after World War II, which "...strips away the academic analysis to get down to the way history hurts not in the abstract, but as embodied in the flesh."[3] A review of Beautiful Terrible Ruins describes Apel's take on "ruin lust," and the contrast between viewing decaying stone structures of past cultures as examples of our superiority, versus seeing the acute decline of a modern city, Detroit, as an anxiety-inducing fear of our own possible future.[6]
