Dr Cynthia Imogen Hammond, PhD

Dr Cynthia Hammond studied painting, sculpture, and art history at McMaster University in Hamilton (BFA 1992), and art history at Concordia (MA 1996). Her doctorate from Concordia's Interdisciplinary PhD Program (2002) won the Governor-General's Gold Medal. Hammond held the first SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Architecture, McGill University (2004-06). She joined Concordia's Department of Art History in 2006.

Hammond's publications range across the history of the built environment, garden history, installation, photography, built heritage, public memory, oral history, feminism and space, research-creation, and Canadian women artists. Hammond's studio work focuses on interspecies relationships in gardens and other kinds of living landscapes, especially those designed or cared for by women. In 2026 the La Napoule Art Foundation hosted her first European solo exhibition, "Les Jardins de Marie".

Hammond's book, Architects, Angels, Activists and the City of Bath, 1765-1965: Engaging with Women's Spatial Interventions in Buildings and Landscape (Ashgate 2012) explores cultural memory and public history in the world-renowned city of Bath, England, one of the few UNESCO World Heritage-designated cities. Hammond approaches the past with the methods of the architectural historian and the site-specific interventions of the contemporary artist. Looking beyond and behind Bath's strategic marshaling of its past, and its reiteration of male architectural heroes, Hammond presents the ways in which women of all classes shaped the built environment and designed landscapes of one of England's most architecturally significant cities. This book is also, as research-creation, an intervention into this city's urban, public memory. The author uses site-specific works of public art as strategic counterparts to her historical readings. Through them, she aims to transform as well as critique the urban image of Bath. At once a performative literature, an extensively researched history, and an alternative guide to the city, Architects, Angels, Activists engages with struggles over urban signification in Bath and beyond.

Click here to read an excerpt from the book.

Recent undergraduate courses:
ARTH 374 Montreal's Vernacular Architecture
ARTH 450 Advanced Seminar in the History of Architecture: space, experience, architecture

For the full list of Dr Hammond's publications, please see her CV.

2023. "Unearthing Feminine Legacies: Cynthia Hammond’s immersive exploration of historic and hidden gardens" (interview). Art Seen: The Curator’s Salon Magazine, Ed. Gita Joshi, 9 (Fall 2023): 31-37.
2022. “A Feminist Arcadian Landscape: The Later Work of Joyce Wieland.” For a special issue of The Journal of Canadian Art History on Joyce Wieland. Ed. Johanne Sloan and August Klintberg. 70-99.
2021. “Architecture, Photography, and Power: Picturing Montreal, 1973-74.” In Photogenic Montreal: Ruins and Revisions in a Postindustrial City. Ed. Johanne Sloan and Martha Langford. Montreal, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 217-245.

To view Dr Hammond's art and creative collaborations, please visit  http://cynthiahammond.org

"Kingdoms within Kingdoms': Les Jardins de Marie." Solo exhibition, La Napoule Art Foundation, France, 11 February - 1 March, 2026. 

"Fleurir." Solo exhibition, La Boîte Ludique, Montréal, Canada, 30 May-30 July, 2026.