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Carol Williams is Professor of Women and Gender Studies and current Executive Director of the Centre for Oral History and Tradition (COHT) at the University of Lethbridge, in Treaty 7 Territory, Alberta, Canada.  She holds a PhD in American and Women’s History from Rutgers, New Jersey. Teaching specialties include reproductive justice and histories; North American women’s history; and critical histories of photography; the latter exemplified by a chapter “Residential School Photographs: The Visual Rhetoric of Indigenous Removal and Containment” in Photography and Migration ed. Tanya Sheehan (2018).

In collaboration with Faye Heavy Shield, Hali Heavy Shield and Linda Weasel Head, Williams is part of a research team on a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project (2018-2021) titled Kainai Women’s Activism in Treaty 7 Territory 1968 to 1990: Contemporary Histories of Social Change. 

Between 2015 to 2018, Williams was an international consultant and contributor on an initiative headed by University of Bergen scholars Dr. Sigrid Lien and Hilde Nielssen  Negotiating History: Photography in Sami Culture and the Indigenous Photographic Studies project funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Williams’s publications include Indigenous Women: From Labor to Activism (2012) a collection of essays on histories of women’s labor within four settler colonies–Canada, Australia, the United States, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Contributors: Marlene Brant Castellano, Joan Sangster, Brenda Child, Faye Heavy Shield, Beth Piatote, Heather Howard, Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Lynette Russell, Susan Roy,  Ruth Taylor, Mary Jane McCallum, Aroha Harris, Cybele Locke, Alice Littlefield, Margaret Jacobs, Kathy M’Closkey, Chris Friday,  Cathleen Cahill, Sherry Farrell Racette, Melissa Rohde and Colleen O’Neill.

Williams’s first monograph Framing the West: Race, Gender and the Photographic “Frontier” in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press, 2003) considered the photographs produced by 19^th century studio photographers Hannah Maynard and Richard Maynard.  Framing the West won the 2006 Norris & Carol Hundley Book Prize awarded by the American Historical Association, Pacific Branch.

She has published extensively on contemporary art by women in North America including, “An Historical Overview of Feminist Cultural Practice in Vancouver 1970-1990,” for The Vancouver Anthology  and on the work of contemporary photography based conceptual artists Jin Me Yoon and Marian Penner Bancroft in “Nation, identity, periphery, and modernity: synthesizing Canada’s photographic history” for  Image, Index and Inscription: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Photography.

Williams is also actively publishing on reproductive  politics and clashes with conservative views in Southern Alberta, for example in  “Campus Campaigns against Reproductive Autonomy: The Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform and the Use of Visual Spectacle as Propaganda for Fetal Rights.”  http://activehistory.ca/papers/paper-18/

 

 

Recent Publications

2017                Guest Co-Editors. Melinda Marie Jetté & Carol Williams (2017): Gender and indigenous–immigrant encounters and entanglements, Women’s History Review, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2017.1333944. Contributors:Gunlog Fur, Karen Hansen, Susan Roy. Illustrated. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2017.1333944

2016       “Residential School Photographs: The Visual Rhetoric of Indigenous Removal and Containment,” Out of Bounds: Photography and Migration ed.Tanya Sheehan. (Routledge, UK 2018). Illustrated. https://www.routledge.com/Photography-and Migration/Sheehan/p/book/9781138244405

2015                “Government Indian School, Arizona,” short essay from Ever Widening Horizon: Photographic Workshop, General Conference Methodist Archives and History Library, Drew University, New Jersey.   Didier Aubert and L. Dale Patterson, Co-editors. “A Picture and a Thousand Words” (June 2015) [online from Feb 2015 to Feb 2016].

2014                “Campus Campaigns against Reproductive Autonomy: The Canadian Centre for bioethical Reform and the Use of Visual Spectacle as Propaganda for Fetal Rights,” ActiveHistory.ca (December 2014) http://activehistory.ca/papers/paper-18/

2012                Editor and introduction. Indigenous Women and Work: from Labor to Activism (University of Illinois Press 2012). http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/89xmc4rr9780252037153.html

2012                “Frontier Photographer, Hannah Maynard: Economic Necessity, Political Incentive, and International entrepreneurialism,” The Cultural Work of Photographs in Canada eds. Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard (McGill Queens 2012): 21-42.

 2011/1999       “An Historical Overview of Feminist Cultural Practice in Vancouver 1970-1990,” The Vancouver Anthology ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991 reprinted 2011): 170-200.

 2007                 “‘She Was the Means of Leading into the Light’: Photographic Portraits of Tsimshian Methodist Converts,” In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada Eds. Mary Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend (University of Toronto Press, 2006):117-146.

2005                “Nation, identity, periphery, and modernity: synthesizing Canada’s photographic history,” Image, Index and Inscription: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Photography. Ed.Robert Bean (Toronto: Gallery 44 & YYZ books, 2005): 76-95.

2003                Framing the West: Race, Gender and the Photographic “Frontier” in the Pacific Northwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).https://global.oup.com/academic/product/framing-the-west-9780195146523?cc=us&lang=en&#

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North America

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19th century, 20th century, 21st century

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Colonialism, Indigenous Peoples, Migration & Immigration, Politics, Women