Rate My Professor Anne Fischer

Anne Gray Fischer is an Associate Professor of History at The University of Texas at Dallas. She received her PhD in History from Brown University in 2018, an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Emerson College in 2010, and a BA in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2004. Before joining UT Dallas, she taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. Promoted to Associate Professor, Fischer was awarded the Victor Worsfold Outstanding Faculty of the Year in 2021 for her commitment to undergraduate mentorship and fostering historical curiosity among STEM-focused students. She serves on university committees including the Committee for the Support of Diversity and Equity and the Campus Accessibility Committee, and conducts workshops for graduate students on professional CV development.

Fischer's scholarship focuses on the history of sexual policing between Prohibition and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s, as well as the genealogy of women’s gun politics from armed feminist movements to contemporary Second Amendment mobilizations. Her first monograph, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), traces how sexual policing of women fueled the expansion of police power in twentieth-century U.S. cities. Select peer-reviewed articles include “Bad, Mad, or Both: A Legal History of Battered Woman Syndrome” (Gender & History, forthcoming 2024), “‘The Place is Gone!’: Policing Black Women to Redevelop Downtown Boston” (Journal of Social History, 2019), and “‘Land of the White Hunter’: Legal Liberalism and the Racial Politics of Morals Enforcement in Midcentury Los Angeles” (Journal of American History, 2019). During the 2024-2025 academic year, she holds the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Princeton University. Her work offers critical historical perspectives on gender, race, law enforcement, and state power.