About
Jennifer L. Shaw is a writer, educator, and art historian. She has recently shifted her focus from writing art history to writing fiction. Her fiction has been supported by grants from Sonoma State University, as well as a writer's residency at ArtsIceland in Isafjordur, Iceland.
Jennifer retired early from her position as Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Sonoma State University to pursue fiction writing full time.
She was recently awarded an MFA in Fiction and Literature by the Bennington Writing Seminars. Before becoming a professor, she received a Masters Degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Stanford University. She is author of three books of art history and is making final revisions on two novels. She is a member of Page Street Writers, PEN America and the Authors Guild.
Jennifer was born in San Francisco. She has lived in London and Paris, but the SF Bay Area will always be her home. Jennifer has two children. She currently lives in Berkeley, CA.
Featured Work
Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun
In the turmoil of the 1920s and ’30s, Claude Cahun challenged gender stereotypes with her powerful photographs, montages, and writings, works that appear to our twenty-first-century eyes as utterly contemporary, or even from the future. She wrote poetry and prose for major French literary magazines, worked in avant-garde theater, and was both comrade of and critical outsider to the Surrealists. Exist Otherwise is the first work in English to the tell the full story of Claude Cahun’s art and life, one that celebrates and makes accessible Cahun’s remarkable vision.
Jennifer L. Shaw embeds Cahun within the exciting social and artistic milieu of Paris between the wars. She examines her relationship with Marcel Moore—Cahun’s stepsister, lover, and life partner—who was a central collaborator helping make some of the most compelling photographs and photomontages of Cahun’s oeuvre, dreamscapes of disassembled portraiture and scenes that simultaneously fascinate and terrify. Shaw follows Cahun into the horrors of World War II and the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey off the coast of Normandy, and she explores the powerful and dangerous ways Cahun resisted it. Reading through her letters and diaries, Shaw brings Cahun’s ideas and feelings to the foreground, offering an intimate look at how she thought about photography, surrealism, the histories of women artists, and queer culture. Recently released in paperback, Exist Otherwise received praise in in Choice, Women’s Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, The Cut, Gay and Lesbian Review and was featured in the podcasts History is Gay and BBC Radio 4, History’s Secret Heroes.
