Dora Apel is a cultural critic, arts writer, and art historian who has written about traumatic imagery and memory, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, cities and ruins. She is the author of six books, including Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (2015) and Calling Memory into Place (fall 2020).She is the W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University.