Brown, Elspeth H.
Contact Information
3359 Mississauga Road N.
Mississauga, Ontario
L5L 1C6
Professor Brown’s research focuses on U.S. social and cultural history from the Gilded Age through the 1960s, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, visual culture, and the history of American industrial and commercial culture (including consumption). She has received fellowship support for her research from the Getty Research Institute, the Library of Congress Kluge Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Philosophical Society, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
She is the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005); co-editor of Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006); and co-editor of Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Professor Brown has published work in Gender and History, the Journal of American History, Enterprise and Society, and afterimage. Her current research is an analysis of the commercial modeling industry in the 20th century United States, exploring the complex relationship among visuality, identity formation, and the commodification of the self in modern American history and culture.
Please refer to the following URL www.elspethbrown.org for Professor Brown's completed and on-going scholarly reasearch.
Publications
- The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005); co-editor of Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006); and co-editor of Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
- The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); recipient of the 2005 Awards for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing, given by the Association of American Publishing, for the best book in Business, Management & Accounting.
- Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (368 pp). Co-editor. Palgrave/MacMillan (May 2006).
Articles (selected)
- “From Artist’s Model to the ‘Natural Girl’: Containing Sexuality in Early Twentieth Century Modeling,” in Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger, eds., Fashion Models: Modeling as Image, Text, and Industry (forthcoming, Berg, 2012).
- “Labor, Management, and Photography as “Social Hieroglyphic”: N.C.R. and the Social Museum Collection,” in Deborah Martin Koa, ed., The New Social Order (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2012)
- “Black Models and the Invention of the U.S. ‘Negro Market,’ 1945-1960” in Detlev Zwick and Julien Cayla, eds., Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices (Oxford University Press, 2011), 185-211.
- “De Meyer at Vogue: Commercializing Queer Affect in WWI-era Fashion Photography,” Photography and Culture, November 2009 vol. 2, issue 3, 253-275.
- “Welfare Capitalism and Documentary Photography: N.C.R. and the Visual Production of a Global Model Factory” History of Photography vol. 32, no. 2 (summer 2008), 137-151.
- “Marlboro Men, Modeling, and Outsider Masculinities in Postwar America,” in Reggie Blaszczyk, ed., Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, October 2007), 187-207. [April 2009: came out in paperback].
- "Racializing the Masculine Body: Eadweard Muybridge's Locomotion Studies, 1883-1887," special issue of Gender and History on "Visuality and Gender,” vol. 17, no. 3, November 2005, 1-30.
- "Reading the Visual Record," in Ardis Cameron, ed. Looking for America: An Historical Introduction to the Visual in American Studies, 1900-2000 (Blackwell, 2005), 362-370.
- "Technology, Culture, and the Body in Modern America," American Quarterly. Vol. 56, no. 2 (June, 2004), 449-460.
- “The Prosthetics of Management: Motion Study, Photography, and the Industrialized Body in World War I America,” in Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Minm, eds., Artifical Parts, Practical Lives (NYU Press, 2002): 249-281.
- "Rationalizing Consumption: Photography and Commercial Illustration, 1913-1919," Enterprise and Society (Oxford University Press), vol. 1 no. 4 (December 2000): 715-738.