Caroline Light

Caroline Light is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in WGS. Her research explores histories of citizenship and belonging in the United States, including how Jewish immigrants created a web of benevolent organizations in the South. Light's first book, That Pride of Race and Character: the Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014) tells the stories of Jewish orphans raised in institutions that lifted them from poverty to prosperity. Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017) tracks the evolution of our nation’s ideals of armed citizenship, from the centuries-old “castle doctrine” to the “Stand Your Ground” laws that have removed the duty to retreat in a majority of the states. A ten-year anniversary edition of Stand Your Ground - with a Preface by historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - is forthcoming.

Courses Taught in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

GENED 1073 Guns in the U.S.: A Love Story

WOMGEN 96-ABL Off the Page and Into the World: Feminist Praxis in the Community 

WOMGEN 97 Sophomore Tutorial 

WOMGEN 98 Junior Tutorial 

WOMGEN 1200 Feminism in Historical Contexts 

WOMGEN 1238 Consuming Passions 

WOMGEN 1283 Love's Labors Found: Uncovering Histories of Emotional Labor 

WOMGEN 1424 American Fetish: Consumer Culture Encounters the Other 

WOMGEN 2040 The Secret Sex Life of Anthropological Objects 

US-WORLD 26 Sex and the Citizen: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the United States