Professor Bassnett’s research to date has focused on moments when photography was central to the disruption and contestation that characterized modernity, particularly in relation attempts to reconfigure cities and campaigns to constitute liberal subjects. She is especially interested in issues of power and resistance, social crisis and reform, and movements for social change. She also writes about contemporary art, especially photo-based practices.
Professor Braun’s work on scientific photography focuses on chronophotographers E.J. Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. In 1994, her book Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne Jules Marey 1830-1904 was shortlisted for Britain’s Kraszna-Krausz award, a prize given bi-annually for the best internationally published book in photography. She won this award in 1999, along with four other authors, for the collection of essays Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science.
Professor Brower teaches modern art and visual culture and the history of photography. In his research, Professor Brower works on the history of animal photography and the representation of animals in visual culture. He is currently working on a manuscript on early American animal photography for the University of Minnesota Press, a cultural history of butterflies for Reaktion Books, and a number of smaller projects including an essay on Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion.
Professor Brown’s research concerns the relationship between visuality and the body in the twentieth century United States. Her work in photography studies concerns two overlapping areas: the relationship between photography and political economy (including production, distribution, marketing, advertising, and sites of commercial leisure); and the relationship between photography and gender (including trans* representation), race, and sexuality.
Professor Cho’s research focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial literature and theory, Asian North American and Canadian literature, and the emerging field of diaspora studies. Exploring a wide range of texts and contexts—from the small town Chinese Canadian restaurant, to contemporary Asian North American literature, to nineteenth-century Chinese pirates—she is concerned with the conditions of diasporic subjectivity.
Professor Dewan is an art historian with a special interest in the visual cultures of South Asia. Her research, curatorial and teaching interests encompass nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture of South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora.
Professor Levin’s research, which primarily focuses on gender, performance, and space, appears in several journals and books. She is Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Theatre Review and editor of several collections on experimental performance and performance and public space.
Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and independent curator whose research focuses on the historical construction of citizenship as a photographable subject. Her dissertation investigates the construction of imperial citizenship in photographs produced by the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee: a project developed by the British government between 1902 and 1945 that used geography lectures illustrated with lanternslides to teach colonial schoolchildren about the land and peoples of the Empire.
Professor Parsons’s research and teaching span a wide range of studies in contemporary western art history, theory and museum practice, with an emphasis on photographic modes of representation. Her recent publications focus on gender, ethics, and notions of privacy in relation to photography. Current research examines the shift from a popular intellectual discourse of photography, in the work of people like Susan Sontag and John Berger, to an academic discourse of photography within the context of postmodernism.
Professor Phu’s research and teaching focus on cultural studies, visual culture, Asian North American literature, critical race studies, and American studies. Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture (Temple University Press, 2012), her first book, explores the relationship between civility and citizenship. Feeling Photography, a collection of essays co-edited with Elspeth Brown, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is currently working on two related projects.
Professor Sliwinski’s research interests range across a number of topics, from the intersection of politics and aesthetics, to the genealogy of key concepts in human rights discourse, to more theoretical investigations in psychoanalysis and the terrain of the imaginary. One of the common threads across these fields has been a fascination with photography—with individual photographers, subjects, and images, but also with the medium itself as a means through which humanity can become a community of witnesses to world events.
Professor Steer’s research focuses primarily on twentieth-century art and visual culture. In earlier projects, she examined the use and manipulation of photography by twentieth-century avant-gardes, including the Surrealists and the Beat Generation. Her monograph, Appropriated Photographs in French Surrealist Periodicals, 1924-1939, is forthcoming from Routledge Press (2016). Steer’s current research looks at the complicated connections between empathy and photography from the 1970s to the present.
Professor Tuer is a cultural historian and theorist whose research areas include photography, new media and performance art in Canada and Latin America, as well as a scholarly focus on colonial Latin American history and indigenous-European relations. She is the author of Mining the Media Archive (YYZ Books, 2005) and her essays have been widely published in museum catalogues, contemporary art magazines, anthologies, and academic journals. In 2013, Tuer received the OCAD University Award for Distinguished Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity.
Professor Wood is a photographer and practicing artist whose research focuses on subjects that relate to the environmental impact of waste accumulation, waste economies, and all forms of visible and invisible pollution. As an art practitioner and educator, she has a commitment to analogue and digital photography and contemporary art and art theory.