Elspeth Brown

Elspeth H. Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her research concerns queer and trans history; the history and theory of photography; the history of US capitalism; and oral history. She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke, 2019) and The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (2005). She is co-editor of Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014, with Thy Phu), “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014), and Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006).

She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a multi-year digital history and oral history public, digital humanities collaboration. At the University of Toronto, she is also Faculty Lead for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, a three-year Institutional Strategic Initiative. She is an active volunteer and former President of the Board for The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives.

Learn more about Professor Brown's work in her interview with View to the U.