Public Policy at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy | University of Toronto

Bio
Elspeth H. Brown is Assistant Professor of History and Director for the Centre for the Study of the United States. Professor Brown’s research and teaching focuses on U.S. social and cultural history from the Gilded Age through the 1960s, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, visual culture, and the history of American industrial and commercial culture, including consumption. Her current research is an analysis of the commercial modeling industry in the 20th century United States, exploring the complex relationship among visuality, identity formation, and the commodification of the self in modern American history and culture.

She has received fellowship support for her research from the Getty Research Institute, the Library of Congress Kluge Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Philosophical Society, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005) and co-editor of Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006). Professor Brown holds an M.A. from the University of South Maine, and M.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University.