Allison Lange

Allison K. Lange is a historian who explores the stories that images tell about the intersection of gender and power in US history. Currently, she is an associate professor at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.

In 2020, the University of Chicago Press published Lange’s book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. The book focuses on the ways that women’s voting rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power. Her next book situates current iconic images within the context of historical ones to demonstrate that today’s visual debates about gender and politics are shaped by those of the past.

For the 19th Amendment centennial, Lange served as Historian for the United States Congress’s Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. She also curated exhibitions at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library as well as a website for Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures called Truth Be Told: Stories of Black Women’s Fight for the Vote.

Lange has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Imprint. She has also provided interviews for media sites like The New York Times, TIME, and USA Today and podcasts like American Girls and And Nothing Less hosted by Retta and Rosario Dawson. Right now, she is creating the first series on American women’s history for The Great Courses. Various institutions have supported her work, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Library of Congress. Most recently, she won a fellowship from the Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, France to teach and research there in the fall.