Professor Linda Steer is an art historian who teaches both in the Department of Visual Arts and in the Great Books/Liberal Studies Program at Brock University. She has taught Banned Books, Introduction to Western Art, Baroque Art and The Modern City as a Cultural Object, a new course she designed in 2006. Using Paris from 1839-1939 as a case study, The Modern City considered the influence of the experience of the city on modern art and literature, as well as the ways in which notions of modernism and modernity contributed to the changing space of the city. This year she is teaching another new course, Authorship and Appropriation in Art and Visual Culture, as well as Introduction to Western Art and Great Books Seminar IV: Modernity.

Professor Steer recently defended her dissertation, “Found, Borrowed and Stolen: The Use Of Photographs in French Surrealist Reviews, 1924-1939,” at Binghamton University, where she worked with Professor John Tagg. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this work focused on the transformation of photographic meaning when nineteenth-century found photographs were published in surrealist periodicals in the early twentieth century. Her dissertation uncovered new connections between modern art and literature, the development of French scientific and cultural institutions, and the history of photography.

In general, Professor Steer’s research addresses the ways in which meaning is constructed in art and visual culture, particularly through the circulation of images. In another project, she is investigating 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.

While much of her work addresses French art and visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she also writes about contemporary art, architecture and photography. Additionally, she is on the steering committee of a multidisciplinary, multi-university research group on the history and theory of photography. In 2006-07, the group received York Seminar for Advanced Research funding for a project entitled “The Circulation of Photographs.”

A covered passage in Paris, 2007.

Tympanum, Notre Dame de Chartres, Chartres, France, 2007.