Jillian specializes in the history of photography, nineteenth-century visual culture, and critical pedagogy. An alumna of our department (BA 1998), she completed her PhD at Columbia University (2006) under the direction of Jonathan Crary and Anne Higonnet.

Dr. Lerner is the author of two books: Graphic Culture: Illustration and Artistic Enterprise in Paris, 1830–1848 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2018) and Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography (Routledge, 2021). Her essays on print and photography have been published in Grey Room, Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, The Art Bulletin, and Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024). Her study of the phantasmagoria, historical retrieval, and the afterlives of social violence in revolutionary Paris is included in A Companion to French Art, 1780 to the Present (eds. Natalie Adamson and Richard Taws, 2026).

Alongside her current research on reparative histories of photography, Jillian is pursuing a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project that explores approaches to social justice storytelling, place-based learning, and pedagogies of relational accountability enacted in undergraduate courses in art history and media studies (forthcoming in Teaching & Learning Inquiry).

Dr. Lerner is Chair of the Art History Undergraduate Committee, affiliated faculty in the Bachelor of Media Studies Program, member of the Critical Image Forum research cluster, and member of the Photography Caucus of the Universities Art Association of Canada. She is grateful for her wonderful students and colleagues, and humbly aware of her privileges and obligations as a white settler learning to teach and live responsibly on occupied territories unceded by the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

Jillian welcomes inquiries about undergraduate studies and the Honours program in art history; she does not supervise graduate or postdoctoral research.

History of photography, nineteenth-century visual culture, media studies