Emily Rothwell

Stream: Visual Culture

Emily Jane Rothwell is thrilled and honoured to be a full-time PhD student in ICSLAC’s unique and interdisciplinary department, with its wonderful director, staff, professors and students. Emily is a proud alumnus of Carleton. She completed her Honours BA in Art and Architectural History right here in good old St. Patrick’s Building –go Ravens! Awarded a generous entrance scholarship, Emily was the first person in her family to graduate from university –a fact she imparts to her students who are nervous about being a “First-in-Family” student as well. Throughout her BA, she was fortunate to win multiple scholarships, awards and bursaries from the superb Art and Architectural History Department and its progressive faculty. Upon graduating from Carleton, she also won the prestigious Arts Medal, a medal awarded annually to the student with the highest GPA within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for each graduating year. Emily treasures her memories from her undergrad (many nights at beloved Oliver’s pub) and is grateful to have chosen friendly, yet academically rigorous, Carleton as her foundational post-secondary home.

Emily then attended Queen’s University for her MA and was a graduate student in their well-regarded Department of Art History and Art Conservation. She was fortunate to have won both a SSHRC and an OGS scholarship for her Master’s. Her defended thesis, co-supervised by Dr. Lynda Jessup and Dr. Susan Lord, focused on the work of the contemporary Canadian artist Janet Morton. Her thesis explored the ways in which Morton’s seemingly whimsical outdoor knitted installations invoked complex spatial histories related to class, gender, race, art, ecology and architecture within neoliberal and transnational contexts. Emily also collaborated on curatorial projects, while studying and living in Kingston, and made great friends there (while also getting to see “local bands,” such as The Tragically Hip and Sarah Harmer, strolling around that musical town).

And now, after taking some time off from academia, Emily has returned to Carleton’s friendly campus and its prestigious Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) to pursue her doctorate. Emily’s interdisciplinary doctoral thesis, supervised by Dr. Mitchell Frank, will focus on the intersection of the visual and literary culture of historic fairy tales, complex spatial histories of diverse childhoods and the historiography of such representations in Britain during the long nineteenth century, as well as other contemporary and historic translocal contexts. To support her doctoral work, she has won the Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholarship (2017-20) and the OGS scholarship (2020-21). An interdisciplinary scholar, focusing on socio-intellectual, literary, art and architectural histories, Emily has been delighted to be a Teaching Assistant for many years (since undergrad) in both English Literature and Art and Architectural History Departments at various universities. She loves students and teaching. Recently she received a small Carleton award for her teaching in her role as a Teaching Assistant for Carleton’s Art and Architectural History Department (2018-19).

In addition, Emily was recently asked to participate in a wonderful summer master-class course (2017) at Yale University, at its famed Lewis Walpole Library. The graduate course was run by Carleton’s Dr. Mark Salber Phillips and Yale’s Dr. Cynthia Roman and it focused on eighteenth-century British visual and print culture. She was also asked to be the sole Research Assistant (2016-19) for a recently published edited volume of essays, with work by globally esteemed scholars, entitled, What was History Painting and What is it Now? (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019) –a work edited by Carleton’s own lauded Dr. Mark Salber Phillips and Dr. Jordan Bear, from the University of Toronto. And since 2017, Emily has sat on the Executive of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO) alongside senior scholars. Her work for the VSAO entails co-organizing two annual conferences, chairing conference panels and writing myriad pieces on behalf of this fifty-three-year-old, yet progressive, scholarly association. Emily has also had her own writing published for exhibition catalogues, for a collaborative chapter in an edited volume by Duke University Press and by Fuse magazine. She has also presented her research at international, peer-reviewed conferences, roundtables and workshops from Columbia University and Yale, to UBC and the University of York, in the UK, to name a few. In addition to her thesis, Emily is currently working on a chapter for a forthcoming edited volume which will focus on nineteenth-century book illustrators. She has also been a member of the ICSLAC Student Caucus, acted as the ACCUTE Representative for ICSLAC, has previously helped to organize some fun social gatherings for ICSLAC students and has been a Peer Mentor to first-year ICSLAC students. Emily is grateful to have made close friends at ICSLAC, found a wonderful supervisor and feels lucky to have such a strong sense of community in her home department at Carleton University.

Email: emilyrothwell@cmail.carleton.ca, ejrothwell@gmail.com
Twitter: @emjanerothwell
Personal Website: forthcoming, stay tuned