Research fellows and affiliates

Distinguished Professor Emeriti

Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art (2011–2025)

Martha Langford FRSC is a Distinguished Professor Emeriti of Concordia University in Montreal. She is the former Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. In prior lives, she was the founding director of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, an affiliate of the National Gallery of Canada, and before that, Executive Producer of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada. She has published numerous monographs, edited collections, catalogues, book chapters, and articles on photography history and theory, and organized photographic exhibitions for museums and festivals in Canada, the UK, and Europe. Langford is currently writing A History of Photography in Canada. The first of three volumes, Anticipation to Participation, 1839–1918, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2025. The second and third volumes are A Medium Unleashed, 1919–1969 (forthcoming 2026) and Momentous Indecision, 1970–2010 (forthcoming 2027). As the former chairholder, Langford serves on the Advisor Committee for the Jarislowsky Institute.

Founding director and distinguished research fellow

Dr. François-Marc Gagnon (1935–2019)

Dr. François-Marc Gagnon, who passed away on 28 March 2019, was the Founding Director and Distinguished Research Fellow of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. Dr. Gagnon was internationally recognized as an outstanding senior scholar in Canadian visual culture. In 1999, he received the Order of Canada. In June 2012, he was honoured by the Historical Society of Canada with the Sir John A. Macdonald prize, a Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research. In 2013, has won the Canada Prize in the Humanities for The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas. He was a teacher, researcher, writer, and lecturer, and a tireless promoter of Canada’s visual heritage. A dynamic and inspiring teacher, he taught at the Université de Montréal for thirty-five years. He was also a lecturer in Concordia’s graduate art history program. Dr. Gagnon was a prolific researcher and received the Governor General’s Award for his 1978 critical biography of Paul-Émile Borduas. His other books include La Conversion par l’image (1975), Paul-Émile Borduas: Ecrits/Writings 1942-1958 (1978), Paul-Émile Borduas (1988) for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécoise 1941-1954 (1998), Jean Berger : Peintre et complice? (2010) and The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas (2012). Other numerous monograph studies span the history of Quebec art, including such publications as Premiers peintres de la Nouvelle-France (1976) to writings on Riopelle. Dr. Gagnon also wrote a substantial number of essays for exhibition catalogues and curated a number of these exhibitions. In addition he regularly contributed chapters to a lengthy list of books on Quebec visual culture. He was also a regular contributor to the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien and was a member of its editorial board, among others. Two issues of the JCAH/AHAC 32:1 (2011) and 33:1 (2012), are a tribute to his extraordinary accomplishments in all aspects of the discipline of Canadian art history; guest-editor Sandra Paikowsky commissioned scholars in the field of Canadian art history whose work, in one way or another, intersected with Dr. Gagnon’s own writings, lectures and teaching. Many of his publications have received awards and all of his writings take pride of place in the history of Canadian and Quebec art. In addition, Dr. Gagnon was an honoured speaker at numerous scholarly conferences across Canada and also reached the wider community through his television series entitled “Introduction à la peinture moderne au Québec for Canal Savoir.” From 2001–2014, he presented a series of annual lectures on aspects of Canadian art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in conjunction with the Jarislowsky Institute. He served on various boards of museums and was constantly called upon as a consultant to art and academic institutions. He taught two brilliantly conceived e-Concordia courses: “Introduction to Canadian Art” and “From Realism to Abstraction in Canadian Art.”

A pillar of Canadian art history, an adventurous and penetrating scholar, an inspiring teacher and public lecturer, François-Marc Gagnon was an indomitable spirit, a force for the importance of visual art and its understanding. The leading expert on the work and life of Paul-Émile Borduas – the pioneering author of the Borduas catalogue raisonné – François-Marc Gagnon threw his net much wider into Quebec and Canadian art, focussing his curiosity, rigour, empathy, and wit on a remarkable range of topics, including natural history – The Codex Canadensis – and historiography – the Writings of Louis Nicolas.

First distinguished fellow

Sandra Paikowsky

Sandra Paikowsky is First Distinguished Fellow of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. One of her early projects for the Institute was the presentation of the conference, Untold Histories, on art in the Maritime Provinces and held at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. She then produced the first history of the Maritime Art Association and its website is found online at maa.concordia.ca. The project was sponsored by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and the accompanying research materials are available for consultation at the Institute. Professor Paikowsky co-founded the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien in 1974 and was its Managing Editor until 2010, when she also retired from Concordia’s Art History Department. She remained the Journal’s publisher until 2012 and is still a member of its editorial board. From 1981 to 1992 she was the Director/Curator of the Concordia Art Gallery. Since then, she has guest-curated various exhibitions, including the Goodridge Roberts 1904-1974 traveling retrospective (1998) and was a co-curator of Achieving the Modern. Canadian Abstract Painting and Design in the 1950s (1992). She also curated the exhibition John Fox: Refiguration (2010). In 2012, she was a contributor to the John Fox: Abstractions exhibition catalogue in a text on his sketchbooks. Most recently she wrote the essay for the 2015 exhibition entitled John Fox Abstracts.

Her wide-ranging publications and writings on Canadian art include for example, “Constructing an Identity. The 1952 XXVI Biennale di Venezia” and “The Projection of Canada Abroad,” JCAH/AHAC (1999) and “From Away: The Carnegie Corporation, Walter Abell and American Strategies for Art in the Maritimes from the 1920s to the 1940s,” JCAH/AHAC (2006). She was the originator and guest-editor of a two-part festschrift to honour the contributions of Dr. François-Marc Gagnon by offering him a collection of essays commissioned by the JCAH/AHAC (32:1 [2011] and 33:1 [2012]). Prof. Paikowsky was also a co-editor of The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (2010) and the author of the chapter “Modernist Representational Painting before 1950.” Additionally, she authored the chapter “The Girls and the Grid. Montreal Women Abstract Painters in the 1950s and Early 60s” in Rethinking Professionalism. Women and Art in Canada 1850-1970. She is also a series co-editor for the McGill-Queen's Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History. Her current research centers on the Venetian paintings and drawings of James Wilson Morrice, publishing “James Wilson Morrice in Venice. The Campiello delle Ancore,” JCAH/AHAC (2005) as well as “James Wilson Morrice’s Return from School: A Modernist Image of Quebec Children,” in Depicting Canada’s Children (2009). Along with being guest editor of the JCAH festschrift for Dr. Gagnon, she contributed the essay “James Wilson Morrice at the Rialto Market in Venice.”

In December 2015, she was appointed as a member to the Order of Canada for her contributions to the development of Canadian art history as a discipline.

Jarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow

The fellowship is held at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and is awarded to support special projects at the Institute and made possible by a generous donation from the Jarislowsky Foundation.

Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere (2017-2020)

Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere received her PhD from the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University (2016). She received a BA in Art History from Mount Allison University (2007) followed by an MA in Art History from York University (2009). Her research interests center on the Canadian photographic landscape and the possibility of a Canadian national aesthetic therein and looks towards topographical survey photographs of the 19th century as markers of an early Canadian identity and aesthetic in landscape photography. Her dissertation, "Mediated Landscape/Mediating Photographs: Surveying the Landscape in Nineteenth-century Canadian Topographical Photography,” reclaims the images produced by four survey photographers for the collective imaginary by considering photographs as both mediated and mediating in their ability to bridge and accommodate a nexus of antithetical readings – maker and viewer, authorial intent and discursive function, art and document, subjective and objective, land and landscape. She has writing published in the Journal of Canadian Art History, the Journal of Canadian Studies, Histoire sociale/Social history, and RACAR. In 2012, Cavaliere was awarded a Lisette Model/Joseph G. Blum Fellowship in the History of Photography to pursue her research at the National Gallery of Canada. In 2015 her dissertation was awarded the Michel de la Chenelière Prize by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Philippe Guillaume, Jarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow from 2015 to 2016

Philippe Guillaume (2015-2016)

Philippe Guillaume is a peripatetic artist, photographer and art historian based in Montreal. His work was exhibited at AirSpace Gallery in England in 2014. In 2013, FOFA Gallery in Montreal exhibited his two-year ambulatory project along boulevard Saint-Laurent and he was invited to create a dérive-based work at PERFOR4 in Sao Paulo. His work is in the collection at Collection patrimoniale de Ia Bibliothèque nationale du Quebec and the National Gallery of Canada. He is also a PhD Fellow in Art History at Concordia University, from which he obtained an interdisciplinary MA (photography and art history) in 2012. His research involves the relationship between walking and photography in art. His essays have been published in the art magazine Ciel variable and he has a forthcoming publication in the Journal of Canadian Studies. He is a member of the Canadian Photography History Research Group, based at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art.

Mikhel Proulx, Jarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow from 2014 to 2015

Mikhel Proulx (2014-2015)

Mikhel Proulx is a cultural researcher of contemporary art and digital visual cultures. His curated projects have been exhibited across Canada and internationally. His PhD project is a study of Indigenous and Queer cultural media on the early World Wide Web. Mikhel holds a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MA in Art History from Concordia University, where he is developing his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim. He is a recipient of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, a Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Stanley G. French Graduate Fellowship, and the Donald L. Boisvert Scholarship For Gay And Lesbian Studies. As well as being an active member of the Concordia graduate community, he is a contributor to several faculty research projects, including the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (PI: Jason E. Lewis), Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim), Networked Art Histories (PI: Dr. Johanne Sloan), and Re:Create Media Art Histories (Dr. Chris Salter and Gisèle Trudel). He was an instructor in the Fall 2015 new undergraduate course, Studies in the History of Media Art: Queer Networks, he has developed a new pedagogical model in which students engage critically with social media in a study of how gender and sexualities are structured in the digital age.

Samuel Gaudreau-LalandeJarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow from 2013 to 2014

Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande (2013-2014)

Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande was named the first Jarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow in Canadian Art History.

Gaudreau-Lalande is a PhD student in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University. He also held a Concordia University Graduate Fellowship and a FRQSC doctoral scholarship. His research analyses the uses of photography in state propaganda in Quebec before the Quiet Revolution. He graduated with a BA in Art History from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2009. In 2012, he received his Master's degree from the same institution with a thesis entitled “Les mécanismes de la transformation du réel dans la propagande photographique nazie: le congrès du NSDAP à Nuremberg en 1933.” His scholarly speeches and articles concern the articulation of images, urban space and theory of photography.

Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow

Erin Silver (2016-2018)

Erin Silver completed a PhD in Art History and Gender & Women’s Studies at McGill University in 2013. Her dissertation provided a queer feminist historiographical analysis of histories of North American feminist and queer art production, as framed by feminist and queer alternative art institutions and spaces from 1970 to 2012. Silver has curated exhibitions at the FOFA Gallery, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, and the Doris McCarthy Gallery. She is the co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of a volume entitled Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2015), the co-editor (with taisha paggett) of the Winter 2017 issue of C Magazine, "Force," on intersectional feminisms, and the author of the forthcoming Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute).

Past resident research fellows

Barbara Clausen (2010-11)

Barbara Clausen received her PhD in Art History from the University of Vienna Austria on Performance: Documents Between Action and Spectator. Babette Mangolte and the Historization of Performance Art. She is an art historian working and living in Vienna and Montreal and teaches in the Art History department at UQAM. As a Visiting Research Fellow at the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art she was investigating the history as well as the national and international significance of performance artists (Françoise Sullivan, Vera Frenkel, Suzy Lake, or Joyce Wieland a.o.), as well as collective artist initiatives and spaces that are committed to critical and performative practices in the arts (La Central Powerhouse in Montreal, Fado Performance Art Center in Toronto, or the Western Front in Vancouver), in Canada since the 1960s. Clausen is specifically interested in researching how political events and social movements of the past, such as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and the Feminist Movement throughout Canada, have influenced the reception, history, institutionalization and establishment of performance art.

Rebecca Duclos (2009-11)

Rebecca Duclos received her PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom). She studied in Canada for her MA in Museum Studies (University of Toronto), B.Ed. in Art Education (York University), and BA in Classical Studies and Near Eastern Archaeology (University of Toronto). Duclos is a past fellow of the American Association of University Women, the Cultural Theory Institute and the Centre for Museology at the University of Manchester (UK), as well as participating in the 2004 dissertation workshop at the Getty Research Institute. She has recently curated Manchester Letheriumat Cornerhouse in Manchester (UK), Voir/Noir at the Musée d’art de Joliette, As Much as Possible Given the Time and Space Allotted with David K. Ross at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, and Magnify with Lauren Fensterstock at the ICA in the Maine College of Art. She is currently the Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stephen Horne (2011-12)

Born in Nairobi in 1948, Horne studied philosophy and fine arts at the University of Victoria, SFU in Vancouver and York University in Toronto. Stephen Horne now lives in Montreal, Quebec and France and was a professor in media arts at NSCAD University in Halifax 1979-2005. His reviews and essays are published in journals, anthologies and catalogues in Canada, Europe and Asia. His book, Abandon Building: Selected Writings, was published by Eleven Press in 2006. In 2010, a curatorial projectPourquoi Photogenique? (Emanuel Licha) was presented at the SBC Gallery in Montreal.

Gilles Lapointe (2008-09)

Gilles Lapointe is a professor in the Department of Art History at UQAM. He has a PhD (2004) and an MA (1981) in Études françaises from the Université de Montréeal. His work reflects theorical issues related to Quebec’s artistic modernity in an interdisciplinary perspective. His current research projects include an intellectual biography of the multidisciplinary artist Edmund Alleyn and a study of aesthetic and intertextual relations between Réjean Ducharme and Arthur Rimbaud. He is the author ofL’Envol des signes. Borduas et ses Lettres (1996), Edmund Alleyn. Indigo sur tous les tons (éditions du passage) (2005) in collaboration with Jocelyn Jean and Ginette Michaud, and La Comète automatiste (2008). Lapointe's publication, L'envol des signes. Borduas et ses lettres (1996), received the Gabrielle-Roy Prize from The Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (1996) and the Prix Victor-Barbeau from the Académie des lettres du Québec (1997).

Monique Nadeau-Saumier (2007-09)

Monique Nadeau-Saumier has an MA in art history from Concordia University, an MA in museology from the Université de Montréal and a PhD in Art History from UQAM. She has taught at Bishop’s University and was also the Administrative Director of its Eastern Townships Research Centre. She has also worked at many museums including the Musée de la civilisation du Québec and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. She has organized a number of exhibitions including, Louis Muhlstock for the Musée du Québec (1995), collaborated on Frederick S. Coburn at the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke (1996) and she organized the presentation, Riopelle et autres Maîtres québécois de la Collection de l’Université de Sherbrooke – Cinquante ans de mécénat (2004).

Jan Noel (2006-07)

Jan Noel is an associate professor of Canadian History and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Noel was the Winner of the Canadian Historical Association's John A. Macdonald Prize for her book Canada Dry : Temperance Crusade before Confederation. Her publications include the much-reprinted New France: Les Femmes Favorisées, the Canadian Historical Association Booklet Women in New France, and over thirty articles in books, encyclopedias and journals. In 2012 Professor Noel published Along a River: The First French Canadian Women. Her institute Fellowship facilitated gathering and analyzing visual material to enhance Professor Noel's writing as well as her teaching.

Rosa Schulenburg (2001)

Born in Germany, where she received her M.A. and PhD in Art History from the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Schulenburg was the Institute's first international Research Fellow. During her one-year tenure in 2001, Dr. Schulenburg pursued her interest in public art by conducting research into Montreal murals and graffiti, and she presented a public lecture at Concordia on her findings. Since returning to Berlin, she has recently been appointed head of the visual arts collection of the Akademie der Künste. She has also contributed two essays on contemporary art and urban space in the Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft(Yearbook of the Guernica Society), Universitätsverlag Osnabrück.

Julia Skelly (2011)

Julia Skelly received her PhD from the Department of Art at Queen’s University (2010) and her MA from the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University (2006). She is the author of No Strangers to Beauty: Black Women Artists and the Hottentot Venus (2008), and she has received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, a SSHRC CGS Master’s Scholarship, a Max Stern-McCord Museum Fellowship, and a William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Short-Term Fellowship from the University of California, Los Angeles, among other awards. Dr. Skelly’s research under the auspices of the Jarislowsky Institute focused on banners produced for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and engravings by John Henry Walker (1831-1899). Skelly is a part-time faculty member in the Department of Art History at Concordia.

Jakub Zdebik (2008-10)

Jakub Zdebik received his doctorate from The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario (2007) after completing his dissertation on the aesthetics of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, he was researching issues of cartography and landscape in the works of Janice Kerbel, Janet Cardiff and Paterson Ewen. This notion of landscape relies on the concept of geophilosophy applied to issues of mapping and diagramming of the environment represented in visual art. In 2012, he published Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization which charts Deleuze's corpus according to aesthetic concepts such as the map, the sketch and the drawing to bring out a comprehensive concept of the diagram.. He is currently a part-time professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.

Resident Fellowship Program

Members and Associate Members are invited to sponsor a Resident Fellow at the Institute (post-doc or independent scholar). Please contact Institute Director, Martha Langford, if you have a candidate in mind.

The deadline to obtain approvals and letters of support is 1 September for a Fellowship to be held the following academic year. For more information on this program, please contact the Institute Adminstrator, Brenda Dionne.

To ensure both coherence and a supportive structure, the Resident Fellowship Program of the Institute has been rethought to increase involvement with Members of the Institute and their graduate students. Under the new system, applications will be sponsored by a Member and will be reviewed by an Institute committee. Criteria for acceptance will include relevance to the current research program of the Institute, the potential involvement of graduate students as research assistants, and the promise of public dissemination of the results. The ideal post-doctoral applicant will be seeking funding through the SSHRC and FQRSC programs. Independent scholars will be looking to consult or collaborate with one or more members of the Institute.