Undergraduate
- ARTH 200 Perspectives of Art History
- ARTH 300 Art Historical Methods
- ARTH 381 Feminism and Art History
- ARTH 366 Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Western Art and Architecture. Topic
- ARTH 400 Advanced Seminar in Art Historical Method: Telling Histories: Women and Art in Montreal
Graduate
- ARTH 800 Art History and its Methodologies
- ARTH 804 Writings on Art: Interpreting Subjectivities
- ARTH 804 Writings on Art: Readings in Continental Aesthetics
- ARTH 633 Creative and Critical Literature in Art History: Readings in continental aesthetics
- ARTH 626 Nationhood and Identity in Canadian Art: What is Settler Colonial Art History?
- ARTH 627 Feminism, Art, Art History: Canadian Women Artists
- ARTH 655 Thesis Seminar
Thesis Supervision
I am especially interested in topics that combine an interest in history with theoretically-driven questioning. Any nineteenth-century project is particularly welcome, as are those that engage with subjectivity or aesthetic philosophy, the visual history of colonialism, the cultural encounter with the natural world, or the method and history of art history. For students with an interest in women and art in Canada I can offer the opportunity to participate in an active research network.
I am currently supervising graduate theses on: canonicity in feminist art history; women's albums in 19th c. Quebec; art conservation as performance; Canadian crystal palaces; fat female bodies in contemporary art; the aesthetics of finitude in contemporary art; lesbian self-representation.
MA THESES COMPLETED
2018
Alena Krasnikova, “Julia Biriukova and the Lumberman in the National Vision of Canada in the 1930s.”
2017
Aditi Ohri, “Recognition on Settler Terms: The Canadian Handicrafts Guildand First Nations Craft from 1900 to 1967."
Barbara Wisnoski, “An Aesthetics of Everything Else: Flat Ontologies and the Everyday."
2015
Chantale Poitié, “To Make Sense of a World: Translation, Germaine Koh, Globalization."
Pamela Mackenzie, “The Fourth Kingdom: Art and Agency in Plastic."
2014
Jason Klimock, ”Beyond Beauty: A Philosophic Consideration of Victorian Era Atlantic Salmon Flies."
Eliana Stratica Mihail, “I Don’t: The Commodification of the Bride in Montreal Art from the 1970s."
2013
Taylor Leedahl, “Aganetha Dyck and the Honeybees: The Evolution of an Interspecies Creative Collaboration."
2010
Wendy Butler, “James Earl Fraser’s The End of the Trail: Affect and the Persistence of an Iconic Indian Image."
2006
David Capell, “OnExperience in the Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller."
Kathryn Beattie, “Aspects of Acceptance and Denial in Posthumous Painted Portraits and Postmortem Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Children."
Julie Boivin, “The Aesthetics of Frivolity: Reinvesting in Balloons, Cake Icing, Bows, Ribbons and Trinkets."
2005
Avery Larose, “The Fragmented City: The Urban Landscapes of Eleanor Bond, Brenda Pelkey and Janet Cardiff."
John Latour, “Manifestations of the Absent Figure in Canadian Sculpture since the Seventies."
Melinda Reinhart, “Lady Falkland’s Travel Album: Negotiating Colonial and Feminine Discourses."
2004
Peter Gallo, “Epistemological regularities of the surface gaze in the works of MichelFoucault and Clement Greenberg."
2000
Carolyn Cross, “BodyMarking within New France: A Contemporary Perspective."
PhD THESES COMPLETED
2016
Kathryn Simpson, Monsters in the Mirror: Strategies of Ugliness in Early-Twentieth-Century Viennese Self-Portraiture
2012
Peter Gallo, "Bio-Aesthetics and the Artist as Case History."
Rosika Desnoyers, "A Genealogy of Pictorial Berlin Work: A History of Errors." (Humanities program)
2006
Marie Shurkus, "Appropriation Art: Moving Images, Presenting Difference." (Humanities program)
Current Research
My individual research asks philosophically-driven questions about the visual and material cultures of the past, with a particular interest in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canada. Currently, I am working on Canadian articulations of the relation between modernism and women. My recent research has focused on subjectivity and art. How does art partake in the creation of a sense of selfhood, and how is it related to our understanding of others? My answers to these questions have touched on subjects as diverse as the triangulation of gender, art and deafness, the ethical responsibilities of the settler art historian, and the fascination for the natural world. In each case, I employ a process of historically situated close looking, paying equal attention to the social contexts in which art was made and circulated, and to the material characteristics of images themselves. To these I marry an interest in speculative thought and theoretical questioning. Here my background and interests are eclectic. My training in a feminism influenced by post-structuralism and psychoanalysis has more recently been expanded by decolonial, Deleuzian, and new materialist analysis. Visually, I am drawn by the challenge of "looking at the overlooked," and my research frequently engages with marginalized artists and genres, such as miniature painting or botanical illustration. Methodologically, I see art history as a creative process whose task is to build a meaningful interface between the objects of the past and the concerns of the present.
My collaborative research occurs in conjunction with the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. This Concordia-based project promotes research on a wide range of historical Canadian women artists through conferences, workshops and publications. We also support research through a Documentation Centre and the development of online historical research tools. After 4 decades of feminist scholarship, what does the study of women's specific experience continue to offer to art history? Our recent work on women's encounter with the structures of professionalism is one example of way in which consideration of women's past continues to pose new insights, challenging art history to reconsider its assumptions and broadening the field of objects and practitioners available for study. CWAHI welcomes student involvement.
