Dr. Laura Browder

Laura Browder interviewed 52 women from all branches of the military for her most recent book, When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans, with photographs by Sascha Pflaeging, which was based on a traveling exhibition of the same title. Her previous books include Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America, and Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. She also edited With the Weathermen: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman, by Susan Stern. Browder is the executive producer of the 2012 PBS documentary The Reconstruction of Asa Carter, based on her book Slippery Characters:  Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Her plays have been produced in Boston and Richmond. 

Her most recent exhibition (in collaboration with photographer Michael Simon and Patricia Herrera) is Voices from a Hidden Epidemic: HIV in Richmond, on view at the Valentine Museum until June 2021. 

For the past ten years, she and theatre professor Patricia Herrera, along with their students, have been producing documentary dramas and museum exhibitions about Richmond civil rights history, as well as developing the digital archive The Fight for Knowledge: Civil Rights and Education in Richmond, VA. 

She is currently completing a biography of her grandfather, Communist Party USA leader Earl Browder.