Biography

After undergraduate peregrinations through math, physics and chemistry, and climatology, I completed a Bachelor’s thesis in historical geography on “Agricultural Settlement in the Ottawa-Huron Tract, 1850-1870″ and a Master’s thesis in historical geography on early landscape photography in British Columbia. I joined the National Archives of Canada as a photo-archivist in 1977 and was Chief of Photography Acquisition and Research from 1986 until 1994, when I returned to full-time post-graduate studies with the assistance of an Education Leave from the National Archives and an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. My doctoral thesis, “Agent of Sight; Site of Agency: The Photograph in the Geographical Imagination,” presents bibliographical, historical, methodological, and empirical perspectives on the use of photographs as primary sources in geographical inquiry. I returned to the National Archives in 1998, and in 1999 was named a Research Associate of the Frost Centre for Canadian Heritage and Development Studies, Trent University, as well as an Adjunct Research Professor in both the Department of Geography and the Department of History, Carleton University .

In 2003, I joined the faculty of Queen’s University and am now Queen’s National Scholar / Associate Professor in the Department of Art, cross-appointed to the Department of Geography, where I teach courses in photography and society, Canadian photography 1839-1939, critical writing on photography, and photography and the making of modern Canada.

Research Interests

• Photography as a tool of the geographical imagination
• Photography and the making of early modern Canada
• The role of Alexander von Humboldt in mid-nineteenth century developments in geography and photography
• Theoretical and interpretive approaches to photographs and other non-traditional primary sources for geographical inquiry

Recent Publications

SCHWARTZ, J.M. 2004 ‘Un beau souvenir du Canada: object, image, symbolic space,’ in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images ed E. Edwards and J. Hart (London: Routledge) 16-31

SCHWARTZ, J.M. 2004 ‘Negotiating the visual turn: new perspectives on images and archives’ The American Archvist 67 (1) Spring / Summer, 107-122

SCHWARTZ, J.M. 2004 ‘Photography,’ in The Oxford Companion to Canadian History ed G. Hallowell (Toronto: Oxford University Press) 485-487

SCHWARTZ, J.M. 2003 ‘Photographs from the edge of empire’ in Cultural Geography in Practice ed A. Blunt, P. Gruffud, J. May, M. Ogborn and D. Pinder (London: Arnold) 154-171

SCHWARTZ, J.M. 2003 ‘More than “competent description of an intractably empty landscape”: a strategy for critical engagement with historical photographs’ Historical Geography 31,105-130

SCHWARTZ, J.M and RYAN, J.R. eds 2003 Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I.B. Tauris)

SCHWARTZ, J.M and RYAN, J.R. 2003 ‘Introduction: photography and the geographical imagination’ in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination ed J. M. Schwartz and J. R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris) 1-18

Joan M. Schwartz, Essay: “Narrative and Illusion: Harnessing the Visual Imagination,” in San Francisco Album: Photographs, 1854-1856 by George Robinson Fardon. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999.

Review: Mary Lou Fallis, Primadonna on a Moose [compact disk] in The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien 43, 4, 1999.

Joan M. Schwartz, “Constituting Places of Presence: Landscape, Identity and the Geographical Imagination,” in Marlene Creates, Places of Presence: Newfoundland kin and ancestral land, Newfoundland 1989-1991. St. John’s, Nfld: Killick Press, 1997.

Joan M. Schwartz, “Fort Chambly and the Creation of Symbolic Space: The Photograph as Site of Meaning,” in Serge Courville et Brian Osborne (eds.), Histoire Mythique et Paysage Symbolique / Mythic History and Symbolic Landscape. Laval: CIEQ, 1997, pp.9-20.

Joan M. Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson: photographs and the construction of imaginative geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography, 22, 1, January 1996, pp.16-45.

Joan M. Schwartz, “`We make our tools and our tools make us’: Lessons from Photographs from the Practice, Politics and Poetics of Diplomatics,” Archivaria, 40, Fall 1995, pp.40-74. (This article was awarded the W. Kaye Lamb Prize for 1995 from the Association of Canadian Archivists.)

Memberships

• Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG)
• Association of American Geographers (AAG)
• Institute of British Geographers (IBG)
• Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA)
• Society of American Archivists (SAA)
• Scottish Society for the History of Photography