Jay Prosser

My work spans critical theory and creative writing, with areas of expertise in gender studies, memoir and life writing, Jewish studies, and the representation of atrocity and trauma.

My first book, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1998), is considered a definitive work of transsexual and transgender studies. My work on photography resulted in two books: one on photography and mourning, Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (2004); the other, in collaboration with Amnesty International, on photographs of atrocity, Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012). I have edited books on literature - one on American fiction of the 1990s; another on Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. I have led major international research projects, including on photography, and on transcultural memories of the former Ottoman Empire.

My most recent book, Loving Strangers: a Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns, published in 2024, is a family memoir that puts Asian Jews on the map, in Iraq, India, China and Singapore. It addresses the significant themes of intermarriage and immigration and meditates on the place of the stranger, in Judaism and in society.

Loving Strangers was winner of the Hazel Rowley Prize and shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize, both for biography.