Ruth Phillips

Carleton University

February–June 2014

Ruth B. Phillips holds a Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Art and Culture and is Professor of Art History at Carleton University. Since completing doctoral research on Mende women’s masks from West Africa, she has focused her research and teaching on Native North American art and critical museology. Her books include Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011), shortlisted for the Donner Prize in Canadian Public Policy and winner of the Ottawa Book Award for non-fiction;Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700- 1900(1998); and, with Janet Catherine Berlo, Native North American Art  for the Oxford History of Art (1998). She served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology from 1997-2003 and as president of CIHA from 2004-08. She was a Clark fellow in 2003, and during her second fellowship will be working on a book entitled Seeing Through Translation: Visual Culture and Exchange in the Great Lakes, 1660 - 1960.