Elspeth Brown

Biography

Elspeth H. Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, former Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States (2006-13), and currently the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. Her research concerns modern American cultural history; the history and theory of photography; queer and trans* history, and the history of US capitalism. She has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute; the National Museum of American History; the American Council of Learned Societies; the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Library of Congress Kluge Center; the American Philosophical Society, and others. She is the author of Sexual Capital: A Queer History of Modeling, 1909-1983 (forthcoming, Duke University Press), and the award-winning The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005). She is the co-editor of Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014); “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014); and Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006). She has published in GLQ, TSQ; Gender and History; American Quarterly; Radical History Review; Photography and Culture; Feminist Studies; Aperture; No More Potlucks; and others. Brown currently directs the The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a five-year digital history and oral history research collaboration that connects archives across Canada and the United States to produce a collaborative digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans* oral histories.