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
Event Coordinator, 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. 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 Latin American Studies Program, and Executive Assistant to the Director of the Master of Architecture Program at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. She has over 20 years experience as a Director/Senior Manager in artist-run centres and film organizations, including Manager of Operations of Graphic Pictures Inc. (documentary films); Director of Art Metropole (one of Canada's oldest artist-run centres); Programs and Publications Coordinator at Gallery TPW/Toronto Photographers Workshop; Executive Assistant to the Executive Producer, Ontario Region, National Film Board of Canada; and Director of the Photon League of Holographers (artist-run centre). Currently, Stella freelances as a copy editor of art publications for various organizations including YYZBooks, the Hart House Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and various journals and freelance curators internationally.
Patrick Vitale
Program Advisor, American Studies Program
csus.advisor@utoronto.ca
Patrick Vitale is the Program Advisor for the American Studies Program, Centre for the Study of the United States. Any questions or concerns regarding the program can be discussed during his regularly scheduled office hours on Tuesdays from 1-3 pm, in the Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place, Room 326N, or by appointment by sending an email to csus.advisor@utoronto.ca . Patrick is a doctoral student in geography working on a dissertation, “Nuclear Suburbs: the everyday politics of the Cold War in suburban Pittsburgh.” Patrick’s research examines the confluence of the Cold War, science and engineering, and suburbanization in the Pittsburgh region from 1937 to 1979. Using the Westinghouse Electric Corporation's extensive involvement in the nuclear industry as an example, Patrick argues that the suburbanization of scientific work was a vital and overlooked aspect of the dramatic remaking of the Pittsburgh region during the Cold War. Fundamental to Patrick’s argument is that the Cold War is constituted at the level of the local and everyday, that Cold War science is situated within a suburban context, and that one force driving suburbanization in Pittsburgh was the desire to protect the privilege of scientific research and researchers. During the 2012-13 academic year, Patrick is teaching USA 310: Post-war?, GGR 336: Urban Historical Geography, and GGR 457: Post-War Suburbs.