Margaret Innes specializes in the history and theory of photography and lens-based media. Her research focuses on the photographic public sphere from the mid-nineteenth century to the present with a particular interest in photography as a socialist form. She teaches introductory and advanced courses on related themes including photography’s broader entanglements with art, politics, capitalism, internationalism, and globalization, among other topics. Her current book project, Collective Forms: Photography in the Era of American Communism, examines the development of workers’ pictorials and worker photography in the United States between the World Wars.

History and theory of photography, 19th-21st centuries; print and lens-based media and visual culture; documentary; historical materialism and critical theory

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

“Prolétariat et quatrième pouvoir : la photographie ouvrière aux États-Unis, 1930-1936,” Transbordeur: photographie, histoire, société 4 (2020).

Book Chapters

“Fortune from below: Picturing American Labor before the New Deal,” in Andrés Mario Zervigón and Maria Antonella Pelizzari, eds. Print Matters: Histories of Photography in Illustrated Magazines (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2023), forthcoming.

Book Reviews

“The Network and the Collective,” [Review of Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network and Sarah Eckhardt, Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop] Art Journal 80, no. 3 (September 2021: 117-119).

Collective Forms: Photography in the Era of American Communism (in progress)

Postdoctoral

2021-2022 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship

Doctoral

2017-18 Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship

2017-18 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities

2017 Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice

2016-17 Smithsonian American Art Museum/Smithsonian Institution, Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellowship

2015-16 Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, Harvard University