In the Loop
Dr. Manon Gaudet, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at St. Francis Xavier University
It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to introduce myself to the MCC. My name is Manon Gaudet (PhD, Yale, 2025) and I am currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at St. Francis Xavier University, working under the supervision of Dr. Erin Morton. I am an art historian specializing in Canadian and American art from the nineteenth century to the present. My current research examines the visual and material cultures of settler colonialism in North America, focusing on how Indigenous and settler artists used art to express competing claims to sovereignty. My first book, tentatively titled The Art of Allotment, is a visual and material history of the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887-1934), a federal policy that imposed private property as a strategy for Native American assimilation and dispossession. Across four case studies, I consider how the federal government mobilized art to challenge Indigenous sovereignty and reorganize relationships among people, land, and property in the United States. My case studies include artworks made both in service and subversion of the Dawes Act, including illustrated certificates for treaty negotiations, a poster advertising “Indian Land For Sale,” and sun-baked Aquinnah Wampanoag ceramics. While two of my chapters address prints and photographs, the other half focus on how ceramic practices at the end of the nineteenth century remade (and refuted) the logic of private property in a more material fashion.
William Purcell McDonald, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, earthenware, 14 in., 1898. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Wells M. Sawyer, 45.147.
I am also working on a second project that examines art made at, and from, coastal landscapes. Inspired by how shorelines challenge systems of colonial organization (including private property), this project seeks to explore the littoral as a geographic and aesthetic category that blurs boundaries and nourishes subversive modes of making and representation. At present, I am researching relationships between the public art of colonial memorialization and the maritime gypsum mines in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that supplied plaster of Paris to the United States in the nineteenth century. As I continue work on this project, I look forward to turning my attention to how contemporary and historic basket artists in Nova Scotia work within maritime ecosystems, and to asking what baskets can reveal about cultural and environmental resilience.
Material culture is central to how I approach history, and I am passionate about understanding how the things we make, collect, and use carry traditions, transmit and resist ideologies, and, ultimately, make us who we are. Having spent much of the past decade working in, or with, museums, I am also dedicated to object-based inquiry as a mode of teaching and delight in guiding students through encounters with the simplest of objects as a lens onto unexpectedly complex histories.
I’m delighted to be joining the MCC community and am eager to get to know this network of dedicated material culture scholars. If anything above sparked your interest, you can read more about my research on American ceramics in Material Intelligence (a publication series that will no doubt be of interest to this group) or in Art Journal, where I wrote about a series of 1920s textiles depicting the US National Parks. Going one step further, please don’t hesitate to reach out – I’d love to collaborate!
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