Professor Linda Steer is an art historian who teaches both in the Department of Visual Arts and in the Liberal Arts Program at Brock University. This year, she is teaching VISA 1Q99 Introduction to Western Art; LART1F90 Poets, Painters and Philosophers; LART/ VISA / STAC 3V96 Imitation in Art and Culture; and VISA / LART / STAC 3V97 Appropriation in Art and Culture.
In general, Professor Steer’s research addresses the ways in which meaning is constructed in art and visual culture, particularly through the intersection of word and image. She is preparing a manuscript on surrealism and photography, entitled Surrealism’s Unconscious: Found, Borrowed, Stolen. In another project, she investigates the use of avant-garde visual strategies drawn from Dada and Surrealism by a 1960s French revolutionary architecture group, Utopie, in their journal of the same name. She is also researching the use of photographs in Beat literature, particularly in the the collaborative work of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Additionally, she is on the steering committee of a multidisciplinary, multi-university SSHRC-funded research group on the history and theory of photography. In 2007-10, the group is exploring the theme ”Affect and Photography.” Professor Steer also writes art criticism.
Recent Publications:
With Thy Phu, eds. “Affecting Photographies.” A Special Issue of Photography & Culture 2.3 (November 2009).
“Surreal Encounters: Science, Surrealism and the Re-Circulation of a Crime-Scene Photograph.” History of Photography 32.2 (Summer 2008): 110-122.
“Photographic Appropriation, Ethnography and the Surrealist Other.” The Comparatist 32 (May 2008): 63-81.
“From Document to Memento: Atget, Surrealism and the Manipulation of Memory.” In Constructions of Death, Mourning and Memory. WAPACC Annual Conference Proceedings. Edited by Lilian H. Zirpolo. Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey: WAPACC, 2006. 48-51.
“Worlds of Birds and Snow.” In Sharon Switzer, Falling from Grace: Scenes 1 Through 6. Exhibition at the McMaster University Museum of Art, November 2006-January 2007. Hamilton: McMaster University, 2006. n.p.
Recent Conference Papers:
“Photographic Appropriation and Montage as Narrative Disruption in the Collaborations of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting. Long Beach, CA, April 2008.
“From Pathology to Ecstasy: Picturing Hysteria in La Révolution surrealiste.” ‘Madness’ Manifest: Creativity, Art and the Margins of Mental Health Symposium. Brock University, January 2008.
“Found, Borrowed and Stolen: The Use Of Photographs in French Surrealist Reviews, 1924-1939.” Humanities Research Institute Symposium. Brock University, December 2007.
” ‘The white cube ejected Heidi for getting ornamented’: Ornament as Gendered Deviance from Modernism in Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy’s Heidi Project.” Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC) Conference. Waterloo, Ontario. November 2007.
Montmartre, Paris, 2007.
Tympanum, Notre Dame de Chartres, Chartres, France, 2007.
