May Chew

Assistant Professor, Art History
Assistant Professor, Cinema

Biography    Publications    Teaching activities   

May Chew teaches at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and the Department of Art History. Her research focuses on interactive and immersive technologies in diverse museum and exhibit spaces across Canada, and how these technologies facilitate the material practice of nation and cultural citizenship. Chew also collaborates on Houses on Pengarth, a research and curation project centred on developing a socially-engaged, experimental art lab in Toronto’s Lawrence Heights community. Before coming to Concordia, she received her PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts &Technology. Her recent work includes a chapter in the anthology Material Cultures in Canada (WLU Press,2015); articles in Imaginations, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History; and Public 57: Archives/Counter-Archives, which she co-edited with Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault.

Selected Publications

“Phantasmagoric City: Technologies of Immersion andSettler Histories in Montreal’s Cité Mémoire,” Public 58 (2019).

“Sounding Nation: Acoustiguides and Myths ofParticipation at the National Gallery of Canada’s Centennial Exhibit,” Journal of Canadian Art History 39:2 (2018).  

Public 57: Archive/Counter-Archives (2018) [co-edited with Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault] 

 “Songlines, not Stupor: Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s nikamon ohci aski: songs because of the land as Technological Citizenship on the Lands Currently Called ‘Canada,’” Imaginations 8:3 (2017) [co-written with Jessica Jacobson-Konefall and Daina Warren]

“Mooring subjects of heritage: proprioceptiveemplacement at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo  Jump,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 22:9(2016). 

“Archeological Detritus and the Bulging Archive:Staging He Named Her Amber at the Art Gallery of Ontario,” Material Cultures in Canada. Ed. Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015). 

“Towards the Other: Instances of the Grasp and Caresswithin the Museum,” University of Toronto Art Journal 3 (2010). 

Teaching

2019-2020

ARTH 348/FMST 348 - Visual Culture: Themes, Methods,Debates