Rate My Professor Anne Fischer

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.