Colleen Skidmore, PhD

About

I am a photography historian and Professor Emerita in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. My education includes a BA from the University of Saskatchewan, an MA from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD from the University of Alberta, as well as executive education programs in university leadership and crisis management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Kennedy School.

In addition to teaching and research, I have also served in a variety of roles in senior academic administration, including appointments as Interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President (Academic) at the University of Alberta. I also served as Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Alberta Press from 2014-17.

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Research

My interdisciplinary research interests lies in the history of photography in Canada c.1840-1940, with a particular interest in women's photographic practices and archives of women in photography. 

Projects and publications range from the first colour autochromes made in Canada by German immigrant photographer Hugo Viewegar in Alberta in 1914 to the historical significance of photography made in convent studios in nineteenth-century Quebec, the aspirations represented by William Notman’s portfolio of stereographic views of Canada presented to the Prince of Wales in 1860, the work of women employees in the Notman studio printing room, and the role of women’s photography in imagining the Canadian Rockies at the turn of the twentieth century. Women photographers, writers, and artists were abundant between the opening of the CPR to public travel in 1886 and the start of the Second World War. Photographs and graphics of women were also abundant during that time. Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography (University of Alberta Press, Mountain Cairns Series, 2017) and This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada (University of Alberta, Press, Mountain Cairns Series, 2006; third printing 2016) draw on the wealth of materials located in public and private archives and collections in Banff, Toronto, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Connecticut, and elsewhere. The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff is especially notable for its vast archive of women's photographic work in the Rocky Mountains.

My most recent work, Rare Merit: Women in Photography in Canada, 1840-1940 (UBC Press, 2022) is the first comprehensive survey of women photographers and studio employees who worked in Canada during the first century after photography’s invention. The professional lives and photographs of about eighty camera women, including eleven accomplished amateurs – descendants of colonists, immigrants, and travellers from the US and UK, working from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island, Nunavut to Niagara Falls – and a dozen employees of studios in Montreal and Quebec are reconstituted and analyzed through historical studio, census, newspaper, audio recording, and other documents from Canada’s unusually rich and diverse archival collections of women’s early work in photography. The insights and conclusions of archivists and researchers, who have collected and studied the traces and impact of women in photography in Canada since 1978, are also documented and examined.

Book talk, Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography (University of Alberta Press, 2017), at the Canadian Mountain Network Mountain Festival, University of Alberta, December 7, 2017. 

Book talk, Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography (University of Alberta Press, 2017), at the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives, Thursday, October 5, 2017.

Book launch and lecture, Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography (University of Alberta Press), at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Thursday, September 28, 2017.

This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada exhibition at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, June 18 - October 15, 2017.

Colleen Skidmore

Vancouver: UBC Press. 2022 June;

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Colleen Skidmore

Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. 2017 September;

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ed. Colleen Skidmore

Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. 2006 January;

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Colleen Skidmore

History of Photography. 2003 January; 27 (Winter 2003):342-348

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Colleen Skidmore

Histoire Sociale/Social History. 2002 January; 35 (Winter 2002):279-310

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Colleen Skidmore

History of Photography. 1996 January; 20 (Summer 1996):122-128

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Colleen Skidmore

Woman's Art Journal. 1992 January; 13 (Spring/Summer 1992):10-14