Raisa Rexer

Raisa Rexer is Associate Professor of French at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on literature and the history of photography in nineteenth-century France, with an emphasis on representations of sexuality and the body. She is the author of art criticism and articles that have appeared in art magazines, museum catalogues, and scholarly publications. In 2025, her article “The Other Feminism: Literature, Sex, and the Novels of René Maizeroy in Fin-de-siècle France” was awarded the inaugural Dix-Neuf journal prize. Her first book, The Fallen Veil: A Literary and Cultural History of the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021. 

Her teaching spans everything from first-semester French to nineteenth-century crime narratives to the history of photography, and she is passionately committed to humanities education across fields and disciplines.