Jacqueline Cannata

My dissertation explores the acts of photo taking and photo making in rural Ontario during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and focuses on photographs that were produced using glass plate negatives. It examines how the act of taking a photo represented various ideological, commemorative, and commercial functions of rural space. My research investigates the relationship between the viewer, the subject, and the camera in an attempt to deconstruct how this new technology changed perceptions of the countryside as well as the photographer’s place within it.

I’m happy to be working under the direction of Dr. Alan Gordon at the University of Guelph and also to have Dr. Catharine Wilson as well as Dr. Adam Crerar on my committee.

I can be reached at:
jcannata@uoguelph.ca

Recent Teaching Experience

  • Sessional Lecturer, History Department, University of Guelph. HIST*3600:
    Canadian Social History    . Fall, 2011.

Recent Academic Talks & Conferences:

  • “Contrasting Lenses: The Different Subjects and Styles of Local Amateur and Outside Professional Photographers in Rural Ontario, 1870-1920” at the Agricultural History Society Conference: Quality versus Quantity: Competing Visions of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Life. Springfield, Illinois. June, 2011.
  • “Military Memories: Recollections of the Fort Erie Fenian Raids, 1864-1880” at the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting: History, Memory, People and Place. Fredericton, New Brunswick. May, 2011.
  • “Amateur and Professional Photographers in Rural Ontario” for the Rural Round Table, University of Guelph. April 2011.
  • “Covert Crimes: The Organization and Tactics of the Fenian Brotherhood in Small Town Ontario, 1864-1868” at the Guerrilla Grads: Alternative Histories Conference. Guelph, Ontario. 2011.
  • “Confronting Tomorrow: A biographical sketch of Kenneth Hammond” at the Kenneth Hammond Lecture Series. Guelph, Ontario 2008.
  • “Focusing on the Negative” at the History in the Making: Sources of Controversy conference at Concordia University, Montréal, Quebec. 2008.