FACULTY & STAFF
Elspeth H. Brown
Director, Centre for the Study of the United States and the American Studies Program
csus.director@utoronto.ca
http://www.elspethbrown.org/
Elspeth H. Brown is an Associate Professor of History, and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States and the American Studies Program, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on U.S. social and cultural history from the Gilded Age through the 1980s. Professor Brown’s work has focused on the rationalization of the body under advanced capitalism, with a specific interest in the historical relationship between visuality and subject formation, including racial, class, gender, and sexual difference. 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 the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929, (Johns Hopkins, 2005), and co-editor of Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960, (Palgrave, 2006). Selected publications include: “Photography and Corporate Paternalism in the Progressive Era,” (History of Photography); “Marlboro Men, Modeling, and Outsider Masculinities in Postwar America,” (2007, in Producing Fashion); “Reading the Visual Record,” in Ardis Cameron, ed. Looking for America, (2005); “Racializing the Masculine Body: Eadweard Muybridge’s Locomotion Studies, 1883-1887,” (Gender and History 2005); “Technology, Culture, and the Body in Modern America,” American Quarterly (2004); “The Prosthetics of Management: Motion Study, Photography, and the Industrialized Body in WWI America,” in Ott, Serlin and Minm, eds., Artificial Parts, Practical Lives (2002). Her current research is an analysis of the commercial modeling industry in 20th century United States, exploring the complex relationship between visuality and the commodification of the self in modern American history and culture. Professor Brown has taught research seminars on “Histories and Theories of Gender and Sexuality” (with Professor Michelle Murphy); “Readings in American History and Visual Culture,” and in winter 2007, “Transnational Commodity Culture”. She has supervised major fields in U.S. history, 1877-present, as well as minor fields in history of women and gender, and cultural history.
Stella Kyriakakis
Administrator, Centre for the Study of the United States and American Studies Program
csus@utoronto.ca
Stella holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts, Fine Arts Specialist degree from the University of Toronto. She comes to CSUS from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, where she was the Executive Assistant to the Director, of the Master of Architecture Program. Stella has over 20 years experience as a senior administrator in film and the fine arts, including Manager of Operations of Graphic Pictures Inc. (documentary films); Executive Assistant to the Executive Producer, Ontario Region, National Film Board of Canada; Programs and Publications Coordinator at Gallery TPW/Toronto Photographers Workshop; and Director of Art Metropole (artist-run centre). Currently, Stella is a freelance copy editor of art publications for various organizations such as YYZBooks, the Hart House Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and FUSE magazine. Stella is also the administrator for the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at the Munk School of Global Affairs, and former administrator of the Laitn American Studies Program at U of T.
Benjamin Pottruff
Academic Advisor, American Studies Program
csus.advisor@utoronto.ca
Benjamin Pottruff is the Academic Advisor for the American Studies Program. Any questions or concerns regarding the program can be discussed during his regular scheduled office hours on Wednesdays from 12-2 pm in the Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place, Room 326N, or by appointment. Benjamin is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation, "The Anarchist Peril: Industrial Violence and the Propaganda of Fear in the United States, 1886-1924," investigates a violent series of assassinations and bombings that haunt the history of the second industrial revolution. Endorsed by a minority within radical movements, these acts of violence took on greater significance as their meaning was reshaped to legitimate competing claims to power by emerging ranks of middle-class professionals. Crowds in the street and marketplace, police and prisons, journalists and newspapers, courthouses and legislatures, and the medical community sought not only to punish, but also to understand why the individual who orchestrated these acts were not self-disciplining. In doing so, Pottruff argues, commentators frequently looked past the class critiques offered by anarchists' words and deeds and focused instead on their bodies, particularly for signs of effeminacy, idleness, ethnicity, and insanity. Pottruff has presented his research in Canada and the United States, and is a recent recipient of the Social Science History Association - Rockefeller Graduate Student Award. He is a graduate of the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor and Masters Degree in History and Peace and Conflict Studies. This year, Benjamin is also working as a T.A. Trainer for the Office of Teaching Advancement, as well as teaching tutorial sections for History 271Y, "American History Since 1607."