Erin Morton
I am a white settler scholar who lives in unceded Mi’kmaq territory in the Epekwitk aq Piktuk district of Mi’kma’ki, a place of relational responsibility governed by the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725-1779. This territory is also where nearly 2700 Black Loyalists migrated to in 1783.
I earned my Ph.D. (2009) and M.A. (2005) in Visual and Material Culture Studies at Queen’s University at Kingston, and my B.A. Honours in History at Mount Allison University (2003). I was hired in 2009 in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick, where I became Full Professor in 2018. I am currently Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at StFX, where I also serve as Dean of Arts.
Research
I am the first author to publish three books in the McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Series with McGill-Queen’s University Press. My first two books are For Folk’s Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (2016) and Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (co-edited with Lynda Jessup and Kirsty Robertson, 2014). These books explore art history in Canada from unlikely categories such as “folk” art and disrupt the conventional disciplinary and institutional narratives of national-colonialist fields of study such as Canadian art.
My third book, Unsettling Canadian Art History, was released with MQUP in June 2022 and won the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art Member Award. This edited volume stems from a collaborative 5-year SSHRC Insight Grant, of which I was Principal Investigator, “Unsettling the Settler Artist: Reframing the Canadian Visual Arts” (2016-2021). This larger SSHRC project explores relational and overlapping colonial histories in the white settler state of Canada using visual and material culture and from Indigenous, Black, racialized diasporic, and white settler positionalities. This project will also produce my next monograph, in progress.
My most recent article-length publications examine histories of whiteness, feminism, kinship, sexuality, and state making under settler colonialism from the early modern period to the present. Two recent articles on this research include “White Settler Death Drives: Settler Statecraft, White Possession, and Multiple Colonialisms under Treaty 6,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 437-459; and (co-authored with Travis Wysote) “‘The Depth of the Plough’: White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 4 (2019): 479-504. I have also examined these concepts and histories in relation to contemporary popular culture, most recently in “Of Folksongs and Feral Children: Taylor Swift’s White Settler Womanhood,” Heliotrope (October 14, 2020).
I also have a new SSHRC Insight Development Grant with Dr. AJ Ripley (St. Thomas University) entitled “First-Gen Academy: Facilitating Participatory Access and Creative Community Supports for FirstGeneration University Students in Postsecondary Education.” “First-Gen Academy” is an interdisciplinary participatory action research and research-creation project that seeks to understand “first-generation” postsecondary student experiences—students who are “first in their family” to go to university—from across queer, racialized, and rural positionalities.
Editorial
I am currently co-editor (with Peter Twohig, Saint Mary’s University) of Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region. Founded in 1971, historians at the University of New Brunswick established Acadiensis to promote the study of the history of Atlantic Canada in ways that challenged central and periphery models of understanding Canadian history. Building on this legacy, today Acadiensis attends to the history of this place (Mi’kma’ki/Mi’gma’gi, Nitassinan, Nunasiavut, Peskotomuhkati, Wəlastəkwihkok) in relation to the Atlantic world and its global legacies of settler colonialism, enslavement, and capitalism. I welcome inquiries about and submissions to the journal via @email, but you can also contact me directly if you have questions about submission. Please follow us on Twitter @Acadiensis.
Service
I am currently on the Board of Directors of the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), where I sit as the Atlantic representative. I also serve on the editorial board of the UAAC’s Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACAR). I currently sit on the Awards to Scholarly Publication Program (ASPP) Publishing Committee with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I regularly sit on SSHRC Adjudication Committees for the Insight program and act as a peer reviewer for the Canada Research Chairs program.
Social media
I tweet infrequently and unremarkably @ErinDMorton.
