BIO
Kelly McCormick

Kelly McCormick is a Ph.D. Candidate in modern Japanese history whose research focuses on the intersection of visual and material culture through the lens of the Japanese camera.  Her research involves analysis of the mass press, materials from corporate and government archives, and in-depth interviews with photographers and designers. She is developing a picture of how discourses on gendered applications of photography, the professionalization of women, economic recovery, and environmental disaster were deeply tied to the domestic and international success of the Japanese camera. Her work has been supported by the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia and the Fulbright IIE. She was awarded the 2018 Japan Art History Forum and Japanese Art Society of American Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Initiative.  McCormick worked with an interdisciplinary team of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) scholars to develop curriculum that teaches undergraduates the value of the humanities through writing. She is excited to be joining the History Department at the University of British Columbia in January of 2020. Before coming to UCLA she completed an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University (2012) and received her BA from UC Santa Cruz (2008) in History and Studio Art.

PROJECT
The Cameraman in a Skirt: Gendering Japanese Photography, 1930-1970.
2018

My dissertation, entitled The Cameraman in a Skirt: Gendering Japanese Photography, 1930-1970 explores the cultural, economic, and political landscape that made it possible for women to become photographers in twentieth-century Japan drawing from the history of technology, art history, and gender studies. Utilizing critical approaches from across the humanities to examine the history of how both the figure of the photographer herself and the object of the camera were constructed to stand for national, cultural, and economic value, I write the history of Japan from a perspective that includes previously ignored protagonists. I also provide a gendered analysis of historical exclusion that connects to and intervenes in research on the Cold War and the international culture of photojournalism, design, and gendered labor. The generous support of the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund supported my access to and analysis of a diverse range of unutilized archives of female photographers so that I can offer an account of how women were not only the subject of discourses on new forms of labor but also active participants in producing critical commentary. In doing so, I unseat prior assumptions about the role of women in global photography by writing a new genealogy of modern visual culture.