Dr. Devon Smither
Associate Dean | Associate Professor
Specialty
Art history, museum studies
About
Dr. Devon Smither is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge. She is a co-author of CanadARThistories, the first open-access textbook on Canadian and Indigenous art history, and a founding member of Open Art Histories and The Prairie Art Network. She is also the Principal Investigator of the current SSHRC Insight project Parallel: The History and Archives of Artist-Run Centres in Canada.
Her research and teaching examine the intersections of nation-building, nationalism, and the visual arts, with a particular focus on modern art and visual culture in early twentieth-century Canada and North America. She is especially concerned with women artists and the ways gender bias has shaped North American art historiography. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among other funders, and has been published in RACAR: Canadian Art Review, The Journal of Historical Sociology, and the Literary Review of Canada.
She holds a BA with Distinction from the University of Alberta in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, an MA in Art History from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Toronto.
Recent Research & Publications
Smither, Devon (co-author). CanadARThistories: Reimagining the Canadian Art Survey. Ontario: Toronto, eCampus Ontario, 2022. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/canadarthistories.
Bodies of Anxiety: The Female Nude in Modern Canadian Painting and Photography, 1913-1945. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History. (Accepted, forthcoming).
Pegi Nicol MacLeod: Life and Work. Art Canada Institute. (Accepted, forthcoming).
“Duration and Unfinish in Pegi Nicol MacLeod’s Self-Portraits” RACAR: Canadian Art Review 46.1 (Spring 2021): 59-74.
“Defying Convention: The Female Nude in Canadian Painting and Photography During the Interwar Period,” The Journal of Historical Sociology 32 Iss. 1 (March 2019): 77–93.
“Gender, Nationalism, and Canadian Art Historiography,” in The Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms (accepted, forthcoming 2024).
“The Nude in Modern Canadian Art,” in Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork, edited by Roisin Kennedy and Riann Coulter. London: I.B. Tauris, December 2018.