Dr. Anne Brydon
Associate Professor, English and Film Studies
Contact Information
Email: abrydon@wlu.caPhone: 519-884-0710 ext.3529
Office Location: DAWB 4-147
Academic Background
PhD in Anthropology, McGill University 1992
MA in Anthropology, McMaster University 1987
BA Honours in Music, University of Western Ontario 1980
I engage in critical interpretive cultural analysis, with a focus on the cultural, political, and environmental legacies of modernity in Iceland and Canada. I trace these legacies by means of an interdisciplinary engagement with the dynamics of power and representation, with how contemporary visual artists in Iceland are re-imagining changing social relations with nature, science, and technology, and with literary, auditory, and visual environmental criticism. I continue to conduct multi-sited ethnographic and virtual fieldwork, in Iceland, Canada, and western Europe.
Since 1988, I have researched the cultural politics of environmental issues in Iceland. I first studied the nationalist framing of debates about whale hunting sparked by international protests against Iceland’s whaling industry. More recently, I have focused on the Icelandic environmental movement that arose to protest hydroelectric development in the highland wilderness at Kárahnjúkar. In other work, I co-edited with Sandra Niessen Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body (Berg 1998). I have also written catalogue essays on several artists, including Eleanor Bond, Joan Perlman, William Eakin, Wanda Koop, and Louise Jonasson. In 2000 I curated At Last Sight, an exhibit (with catalogue) of photographic work by Arni Haraldsson, held at Museum London (Canada) and the Winnipeg Art Gallery of Manitoba.
Some of my publications can be downloaded through Scholars Commons @ Laurier.
Additional Information
Teaching in 2013-14
Fall term: HI299B History of Modern Art from 1835 to the 1970s
description coming soon
Winter term: NO309F Aboriginal Representations in Contemporary Canada
This course investigates contemporary Aboriginal cultural productions in visual arts, music, literature, television and film to explore how artists and cultural workers negotiate the complex and contradictory relationships between Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian traditions of representation, performance and storytelling.
