Short Bio: A specialist in photography acquisition and research at the National Archives of Canada for more than two decades prior to her faculty appointment, Joan M. Schwartz brings expertise in archives, materiality, memory, and institutional discourse to her teaching and writing. An Adjunct Research Professor in both the Department of History and the Department of Geography at Carleton University, Ottawa, as well as an Associate Programme Advisor for the Portrait Gallery of Canada and a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, she has published and lectured widely in the field of archives, historical geography, and the history of photography, and has served on the editorial boards of The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (2004) and the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Photography (2007). She co-edited Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (with James Ryan for I.B.Tauris, 2003) and Archives, Record, and Power, two double issues of Archival Science (with Terry Cook in 2002). Her current research focuses on the history of photography and society, and on theoretical issues relating to archives and memory. With the support of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, she is currently engaged in a three-year project focusing on the role of photographic publications in nineteenth-century Canadian nation-building.
Research: Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (co-edited with James R. Ryan), London: I.B. Tauris, 2003, with co-authored essay, “Introduction: Photography and the Geographical Imagination,” pp.1-18. (2nd printing 2006, 3rd printing 2009), 2009; “The Archival Garden: Photographic Plantings, Interpretive Choices, and Alternative Narratives,” in Terry Cook( ed.);Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions: Essays in Honor of Helen Willa Samuels. Society of American Archivists, 2011, pp.69-110; “Felix Man’s ‘Canada’: Imagined Geographies and Pre-Texts of Looking,” in Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard (eds), The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming 2011, pp.3-22; “Complicating the Picture: Place and Memory between Representation and Reflection,” in James Opp and John Walsh (eds), Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada. Van UBC Press, 2010, pp.292-312; “Overlapping Ambiguities, Disciplinary Perspectives, and Metaphors of Looking: Reflections on a Landscape Photograph,” in Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J Nicholas Entrikin, and Douglas Richardson (eds), Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds Geography and the Humanities.;Routledge, 2011, pp.227-236.