Dr Elaine Cheasley Paterson is Professor of Craft Studies in the Department of Art History. She holds a PhD from Queen’s University (Kingston, 2004), where she was a recipient of the Bader Fellowship in Art History.
Her research concerns women’s cultural philanthropy in early twentieth-century British, Irish and Canadian craft guilds of the home arts movement and for tracing a lineage from this historical material to current resurgences in Do-it-yourself, maker culture and craftivist practices. A new line of her research focusses on education, settlement, social benevolence and imperial philanthropy (through the migration of people, craft practices and objects) in early twentieth-century Britain and Canada.
Her writing and teaching are focused on the relationships between material culture and feminist theory, with an emphasis on craft history, critical heritage studies and the decorative arts. Another significant stream of her research, emerging from her teaching, is centred around questions of skill, hybridity, and pedagogy within a contemporary craft milieu.
Some of her publications include Craft and Heritage: Intersections in Critical Studies and Practice (2021), a special issue on Identity, Craft, Marketing of the Journal of Canadian Art History (2018), and Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts (2015) with Susan Surette. Recent essays of note: “Our Lady of the Snows : Settlement, empire and ‘the children of Canada’ in the needlework of Mary Seton Watts” in L. Binkley and J. Amos, eds. Stitching the Self (2020); “Gifted Design: Imperial Benevolence in the Needlework of Mary Seton Watts” in Design and Agency, eds J. Potvin and M. Marchand (2020); and “Tracing Craft — Labour, creativity, and sustainability in the Home Arts Movement” Journal of Canadian Art History (Fall 2019).
She is a member of the Centre for the Study of Canadian Women Artists and the Quebec Quilt Registry Project at Concordia, a Research Fellow of the Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Craft Biennial. She is the series editor, with Susan Surette, for Bloomsbury Academic’s Critical Craft Studies Series (launched in 2022).