Dr. Devon Smither

Fine Arts Dean's Office, Art
Associate Dean | Associate Professor

Specialty

Art history, museum studies

About

Dr. Devon Smither is currently Associate Dean for the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge. She is an Associate Professor of Art History/Museum Studies and a founding member of Open Art Histories and Art Under the Big Sky: The Prairie Art Network. Her research and teaching examine the intersections of nation-building and nationalism, the visual arts, and the development of modern art and culture in early twentieth-century Canada and North America, with a specific focus on women artists and the ways that gender bias has shaped North American art historiography. Her research has been generously funded by, among other sources, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Terra Foundation of Art. She has published in RACAR: Canadian Art Review, The Journal of Historical Sociology, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others. She holds a BA with Distinction from the University of Alberta in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies, an M.A. in Art History from the University of British Columbia and a PhD 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.

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