Dr Emily Brady

BA American and Canadian Studies with Year Abroad (University of Nottingham); MRes American Studies (University of Nottingham); PhD American Studies (University of Nottingham)

I completed my PhD in American Studies at the University of Nottingham in May 2021. My thesis focussed on the role of Black women photographers in the Civil Rights Movement. From September 2021 to September 2022, I worked as a Teaching Fellow in American History at the University of Leeds. Alongside my MRes (2016-2017) and BA (2011-2015) in American Studies from the University of Nottingham, I also had a year abroad at The College of New Jersey.

My primary area of research is the interplay between photography and activism in the twentieth-century United States, particularly focussed on the Civil Rights Movement. My PhD thesis, entitled “I Didn’t Know She Took Pictures”: African American Women Photographers in the Long Civil Rights Movement, emphasised the empowering work of African American women photographers in the movement. For my contribution to the postgraduate community and the high standard of my research, I won the Heymann Research Scholarship (Tri-Campus Postgraduate Awards, 2020). My next research project will interrogate the construction of ‘iconic’ civil rights photography through intersectional analysis and explore how memory is gendered through a photographic lens.
I am also passionate about developing intersectional and interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches. I am currently project lead of “Bridging the Resource Gap – American Studies Resources for 16-19,” and am interested in how photography can be employed to enhance student engagement. As of June 2021 I assumed the role of the Early Career Academic Representative for the British Association of American Studies (BAAS).

“"Shutterbug?": African American Women Photographers and the Politics of Self-Representation” in special series “In The Round: Producing and Consuming the Image of the Female Artist,” Panorama, forthcoming August 2023.

““I Like To Make Pictures of Children”: African American Women Photographers as Mothers, Protestors, and Businesswomen,” in Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez- Diego (eds.) Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press, October 2022)

““I take the pictures as I see them”: Doris Derby as Photographer, Womanist, Community Organiser and Activist in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American Studies, February 2022