Faculty Profile
- Brown, Elspeth Ph.D. Yale
- Associate Professor, UTM
- elspeth.brown@utoronto.ca
- (416) 946-8011
- Office: MU 326N
Field: Modern American social and cultural history; queer and trans* history and theory (US); photography history and theory; history of capitalism; history of gender + sexuality (US).
Elspeth H. Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and former Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States (2006-13) and is currently the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. Her research concerns modern American cultural history; history of US capitalism; LGBT and trans* history (US) and the history and theory of photography. She is the author of award-winning The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005) and is co-editor of Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006); Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014); and “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014). 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 currently working on two main projects: a queer history of the modeling industry in the US (under contract with Duke University Press); and a collaborative digital oral history project on US and Canadian LGBTQ history.
Professor Brown has taught research seminars on “Post-45 US Histories of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality”; “Readings in Post-1945 US History”; “Cultural History/Cultural Theory”; “Transnational Commodity Culture”; “Histories and Theories of Gender and Sexuality” (with Professor Michelle Murphy); and “Readings in American History and Visual Culture.” She has supervised major fields in U.S. history, 1877-present, as well as minor fields in history of women and gender; business history; and cultural history.