Abbie Reese is a writer and filmmaker with a particular interest in the lives of women—their rites of passage, their public and private performances—in primary oral cultures and enclosed communities. A PhD student in U.S. and Public History, Abbie approaches the construction of individual and cultural identities from an interdisciplinary perspective. She is author of Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns (Oxford University Press, 2014) and filmmaker of the collaborative documentary film, Chosen (Custody of the Eyes).

PhD student at Loyola University Chicago, 2021-present

Research: history of women, gender, and sexuality, the body, surveillance
Research assistant to history professor Alice Weinreb

Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction writing from the University of California, Riverside, 2021

Studied with Reza Aslan, Katie Ford, Laila Lalami, and Jane Smiley

Fellow at the University of Chicago Center in Paris and engaged with the Edgar Morin Centre, 2017

ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship and three-month residence at the University of Bern Institute of Social Anthropology, 2013

Mentored by visual anthropology professor Luc Schaedler

Master of Fine Arts degree in visual arts from the University of Chicago, 2013

Research assistant to English professors W.J.T. Mitchell and Hillary Chute
Artist’s Salon Assistant to cartoonist and visiting professor Alison Bechdel at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality

Fellow at Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office Summer Institute, 2008

Volunteered for one year in the communication department aboard a hospital ship in Freetown, Sierra Leone, 2003-2004

Worked as a handler for a BBC team and drove them by Land Rover to Kono, the diamond district bordering Liberia, for their television and radio productions on vesico-vaginal fistula

Dual citizen of the United States and Luxembourg

Vermont Studio Center – 2010

recent Publications

In the Playhouse (Collection)
Los Angeles Review of Books – February 20, 2021
https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/in-the-playhouse/

In a Place of Santuary, I Found Myself: A Conversation with Shin Yu Pai
Air/Light Magazine – Summer 2021
https://airlightmagazine.org/airlight/issue-3/shin-yu-pai-interview/

Who Does the United States Belong to?: A Conversation with Laila Lalami
Los Angeles Review of Books – February 17, 2021
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/who-does-the-united-states-belong-to-a-conversation-with-laila-lalami/

Ghosts in the Borderlands: A Conversation with Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Los Angeles Review of Books – February 16, 2021
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ghosts-in-the-borderlands-a-conversation-with-stephanie-elizondo-griest/

Writing Is a Ritual: A Conversation with Karen Tei Yamashita
Los Angeles Review of Books – February 15, 2021
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/writing-is-a-ritual-a-conversation-with-karen-tei-yamashita/