Alumni Spotlight: Anton Lee

Photo by Melissa Naef

We caught up with Anton Lee, who earned his doctorate in the department in 2018 and taught as a sessional lecturer from 2018 to 2021. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Philosophy at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD). Prior to NSCAD, he taught and advised students at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, McGill University, and the University of Houston.

Lee is working on developing his doctoral dissertation, Narrative Forms and Visual Sequences: The New Photography in American Practice and French Discourse, 1968–1989, supervised by Professor Emerita Catherine M. Soussloff, and advised by Professor Emeritus Scott Watson, and Associate Professor T’ai Smith into a book.

It examines the methods of sequencing developed by important American photographers in the late 1960s, and how their work was received in France and the United States in the following decades. Lee unveils the obscure phenomenon of the “Nouvelle Photographie” in France, where renowned thinkers, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, elaborated on the epistemological specificity of the photographic sequence.

It was this research interest in Foucault that brought him to UBC from South Korea to work with Professor Soussloff, having followed her works on Foucault within the visual arts. Under her mentorship, their relationship was not only formative in developing professional competencies for Lee as a researcher and writer, but also transformative. Lee speaks of the relationship as having “literally shaped my new identity of an Anglophone researcher who had just arrived on foreign soil, but it also altered the way I approached art and history away from the highly abstract headspace of philosophy in which I had previously been trained at Seoul National University.”

This proved fertile ground for scholarly collaboration and led to Lee contributing a chapter to a volume Soussloff edited, Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twenty-First Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Most recently in May 2024, Lee and Soussloff co-organized an academic symposium “Foucault: Art, Histories, and Visuality in the 21st Century” at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. The symposium also brought together Associate Professor T’ai Smith, AHVA PhD candidate Titilope Onolaja, and Associate Professor Gabrielle Moser at York University, a former postdoctoral fellow in the department.

Lee has taught such topics as the history and theory of photography, postmodern and contemporary art, introductions to global art history, and art historical methods. When it comes to teaching, Lee continues to be inspired by his time spent within AHVA’s interdisciplinary structure where art history, studio art, and curatorial studies collaborate through critical thinking.

This approach serves the plurality his students’ practices—art, design, craft, photography, and film—and opens pathways to a criticality that thrives on creative minds.