MARIANNE HIRSCH is William Peterfied Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is Vice-President of the Modern Language Association of America. Her current interests include cultural memory, testimony and photography. Her most recent books are Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, written with Leo Spitzer; Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, co-edited with Nancy K. Miller, and The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. She is also the author of The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative Psychoanalysis, Feminism and editor or co-editor of a number of volumes, including Conflicts in Feminism, The Familial Gaze, and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust.

In Family Frames Marianne Hirsch uncovers both the deception and the power behind the visual record of family photographs. Hirsch's explorations range across Art Spiegelman's Maus, the 1955 MOMA Family of Man exhibition, the work of Cindy Sherman and Sally Mann, and familial conventions in fiction and essays.