Carol Williams

October 2023

A cultural historian, Carol Williams taught for eleven years as an itinerant sessional across Canada and the western United States before having the good fortune and privilege to secure a permanent position at the University of Lethbridge in the traditional territory of the Siksikaitsiitapi.  Book publications include an edited collection, Indigenous Women: From Labor to Activism (2012) and a monograph, Framing the West: Race, Gender, and the Photographic ‘Frontier’ in the Pacific Northwest (2003). A  critical biography of 19th c studio photographer Hannah Maynard may be found in The Cultural Work of Photographs in Canada (2012).  Her ongoing fascination with the political contest between anti-abortion activism and feminist endeavours to secure bodily autonomy has motivated a number of essays on reproductive justice in Alberta  the most recent is “Reproductive self-determination and the persistence of “family values” in Alberta from the 1960s to the 1990s” (2020).  Originally trained as an interdisciplinary artist at Simon Fraser University, Williams was one of the founders of  two artist-run centres in the late 1980s: Worksite: A Feminist Collective and the Association for (N)On Commercial Culture.  She has published on Canadian-based contemporary artists including on Lorna Brown, Jin Me Yoon, Marion Penner Bancroft, Dagmar Dahle, Lorna Russell, Rebecca Burke, among others.