Steering Team

Principal Investigator, The Family Camera Network
Associate Professor, Western University

Thy Phu was born in Vietnam, and grew up in Toronto, where she lives with her family and three cats. Since completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, Thy joined Western University in 2005 where she is presently an Associate Professor of English and Writing Studies. She has also held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and presently serves as a research associate at the Royal Ontario Museum. Her work focuses on the visual representation of race and gender among diasporic communities, and has received supported by SSHRC Connection, Insight, and Partnership Development Grants. She is the author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, and co-editor of Feeling Photography, a book that examines our deep emotional attachment to images.

Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture, Royal Ontario Museum
Associate Professor, University of Toronto

Deepali Dewan is a Senior Curator in the Department of World Cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum and an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, where she specializes on the art and visual culture of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.  Her research concerns questions about colonial and modern art, vernacular and hybrid visual forms, art education, and the production of knowledge. Her current research focuses on the photographic image, with a view toward understanding how the practice of photography has shaped contemporary ways of viewing and being in the world. She is the author of Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-Century India (2013, co-authored with Deborah Hutton), Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs (2012), and the editor of Bollywood Cinema Showcards: Indian Film Art from the 1950s to the 1980s (2011). All three were accompanied by exhibitions.

Associate Professor, University of Toronto

Elspeth Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where her research concerns the history and theory of photography; modern American cultural history; queer and trans* history; and the history of US capitalism. She is the author of award-winning The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005) and Sexual Capital: A Queer History of Modeling, 1909-1983 (forthcoming, Duke University Press). She has co-edited two volumes: Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014; Thy Phu, co-editor) and Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006). Brown currently directs the The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a five-year digital history and oral history research collaboration that connects archives across Canada and the United States to produce a collaborative digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans* oral histories (http://lgbtqdigitalcollaboratory.org). She is a founding member of the Toronto Photography Seminar (http://www.torontophotographyseminar.org).

Associate Professor, Western University

Sarah Bassnett is associate professor of art history at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City (2016) and curator of a related exhibition at City of Toronto Archives Gallery (2012-13). Her essays have been published in journals such as History of Photography and Photography & Culture. She co-edited a special issue of Visual Studies on “Cold War Visual Alliances” (2015) with Andrea Noble and Thy Phu, and she is a founding member of the research collective, the Toronto Photography Seminar.

Associate Professor, York University

Sarah Parsons is an associate professor in Art History and Visual Culture at York University, where she specializes in the history of photography, and modern and Canadian art. Parsons is the editor of Emergence: Contemporary Canadian Photography (Gallery 44/Ryerson, 2009) and Photography After Photography: Gender, Genre, and History (Duke, 2017) a volume of essays by Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Her research on 19th century Canadian photographer William Notman has been published by the Art Canada Institute and the McCord Museum. Other essays have appeared in edited volumes and in the journals, History of Photography, Photography & Culture, and the Review of Canadian Art. Her current research focuses on the interconnected histories of privacy and photography.