Faculty Book-Length Publications (Selected)

Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections 

by Eleanor M. Hight

Ashgate Publishing, 2011

excerpt from book cover: Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections examines the evidence left behind from a famous first encounter--that of prominent New England Americans with the remnants of feudal Japan in the 1870s and 1880s.  The study reveals that, despite these Americans' varied reasons for travelling to  Japan and studying it's culture, a common desire united all of their collecting activities: to gather photographic documentation of a Japan they believed was disappearing under the pressures of trade and industrialization.

This book is available from Ashgate Publishing.

Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place

edited by Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson
Routledge, 2002

excerpt from book cover: Colonialist Photography is an absorbing collection of essays and photographs exploring the relationship between photography and European and American colonialism. The book is packed with well over a hundred captivating images ranging from the first experiments with photography as a documentary medium up to the decolonization of many regions after World War II.

By drawing upon methods from anthropology, literary criticism, geography, imperial history, and art history, Hight and Sampson offer a rich source of current ideas about the relationship between colonialism and visual representation. Using case studies and recent forms of interpretive analysis, these post-colonial readings provide a thought-provoking analysis of how we imagine race and place.