Congratulations to Prof. Joan Schwartz on her retirement!

The Department of Art History and Art Conservation offers its warmest wishes and congratulations to Professor Joan Schwartz upon her retirement on December 31, 2022. 

Professor Schwartz is an internationally acclaimed historian and theorist of photography, archivist, curator, and cultural geographer, who joined Queen’s University in 2003 as a Queen’s National Scholar. Prior to Queen’s, she had established her professional career at the Library and Archives of Canada (LAC), where, between 1977 and 2003, she held several key positions in photography acquisitions and research including Senior Specialist, Chief of Section, and Archivist. It was during her years at the LAC when Dr. Schwartz drew upon her deep material knowledge of photography, archival practices, and geography to examine, with an uncanny perspicacity, the complicated intersection of power, knowledge, colonialism, and images. She became, and remains, a prolific scholar and public speaker, but her essays co-authored with her former colleague at LAC, the late Terry Cook, remain among the most cited and reprinted articles in photography studies today. Professor Schwartz generously shared her wide-ranging expertise and experiences with students at Queen’s where she introduced an array of undergraduate and graduate courses and contributed to the training of numerous graduate students within and beyond the department. Experiential learning was a hallmark of Professor Schwartz’s pedagogical approach, and she organized numerous visits to museums and archives around Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto to enable students to have first-hand experiences in and with collections.

Professor Schwartz is a rare “scholar-archivist-curator” who is as deeply committed to scholarship as she was towards advancing the mission of the institution at which she worked for more than twenty years, the Library and Archives Canada. While at the LAC, Professor Schwartz curated numerous photographic exhibitions and provided a new visibility for the national archives’ photographic holdings, which she expanded prodigiously. She acquired iconic works including the now famous Barbara Woodley photograph of Prime Minister Kim Campbell, as well as many historical daguerreotypes, prints and photographic album such as the photos of Frederick Dally, which document early Canada, its people, and places. At Queen’s, Professor Schwartz dedicated herself to teaching, mentorship and served as the Head of the Department of Art History and Art Conservation between 2015 - 2019, where she contributed to major advancement initiatives in Art Conservation and oversaw a brisk period of faculty renewal.

Professor Schwartz is a highly distinguished faculty member, a recent Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is a Fellow of the Association of Canadian Archivists, Royal Society of Canada, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She twice won the W. Kaye Lamb Prize for the best article in Canada’s archive journal, Archivaria, and is the recipient of numerous Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grants. 

We wish Professor Schwartz a very happy retirement on her marvelous career. We thank her profusely not only for her commitment to Queen’s but for her longstanding work at the Library and Archives of Canada, which has been a benefit to the nation.