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Advisory: As Halifax Water is currently undertaking work at the Fountain campus, we ask our community to not drink the water at the Fountain campus. We will update you as soon as the work has been completed.
Dr. Anton Lee specializes in the history and theory of photography, focusing on the geopolitical contexts of European and Anglo-American countries from the early 20th century to the present. This primary scope of research has been expanded to other periods and regions in the global histories of photography, including East Asia, the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Pacific Northwest. His research interests include: photographic multiples in sequential or serial forms; the epistemology of the photobook; photographyโs relationship with text and narrative; critical discourse on photography circa 1970s; critical theory and poststructuralism in the global setting. Through his research and teaching, Anton reevaluates the often maligned aspects of photography, pertaining to confusion, illegibility, and fiction. This is an effort to rethink photography as a vehicle for imaginative and transgressive experiences, in anticipation of a more fluid understanding of selfhood and otherness.
Before joining ะึรรยายื, Anton taught and advised undergraduate and graduate students at the University of British Columbia, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, McGill University, and the University of Houston. Previous course topics encompass: photography history and theory; contemporary photography and lens-based art; postmodern and contemporary art; introductions to global art history; 19th-century visual culture; Korean modern and contemporary art; and art historical methods. His classes aspire truly global, inclusive, and decolonial approaches to subject matter, and this commitment is reflected on course design, from lecture content to assignments. Leeโs most recent classes on contemporary photo theory explored such urgent issues as ecology, petrocapitalism, race and ethnicity, trans and non-binary, the posthuman, indigeneity, migration, and diaspora. His pedagogy greatly values a dynamic pursuit of criticality through in-class debates and research-creation method.
Lee is currently working on his first book, preliminarily titled New Wave of American Photography: The Rise of Photographic Sequence in the United State and France, 1968โ1989. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in various academic journals and art magazines, including Critical Inquiry, History of Photography, Canadian Art, and Afterimage. Selected publications include: โโA dream, dictating its own courseโ: On Ralph Gibsonโs Photobook Trilogy, 1970โ1974,โ Compendium: Journal of Comparative Studies, no 2 (2022); โScenes of Coexistence,โ in Bouquet by Lorraine Gilbert (Montrรฉal: VU, 2021); โPhotography, Multiplicity, Promiscuity: Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin,โ Materiali Foucaultiani 9, nos. 17/18 (2020); โThe Photogenic Invention of Thought-Emotion: Duane Michals and Michel Foucault,โ in Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century edited by Catherine Soussloff (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). Lee was the Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona in 2016 and the Visiting Researcher at the Universitรฉ Paris-Sorbonne in 2015.