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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
McGill University, Faculty of Arts Department of Art History and Communication Studies
September 5, 2017
McGill University Welcomes Dr. Shane Hollander as Assistant Professor of Art History
MONTREAL — The Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Shane Hollander as Assistant Professor, effective this fall semester. Dr. Hollander joins McGill's faculty following the completion of his doctoral studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France, where he was awarded his doctorate in June 2017.
Dr. Hollander's research focuses on the art and visual culture of the French colonial period in Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), with particular attention to the institutional practices through which colonial bodies — most notably the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) in Dakar — catalogued, reframed, and systematically appropriated the indigenous aesthetic traditions of West Africa. Dr. Hollander's work draws on extensive archival research conducted at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence and the IFAN archive at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. His work recovers what colonial cataloguing practices obscured and asks what it means to study an artistic tradition through the institutional record of its erasure.
His doctoral dissertation, The Administrative Eye: IFAN's Acquisition Practices and the Visual Cultures of French West Africa, 1936–1960, was awarded the Prix de thèse de l'EHESS in 2017 and was nominated for the George A. Mitchell Distinguished Dissertation Award in African Art History by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.
Dr. Hollander received his Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours from the University of Toronto in 2011, where he majored in Art History and Visual Studies. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was the recipient of a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
His research has appeared in African Arts and in the Bulletin de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire. He has presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference, the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, and the Arts Council of the African Studies Association Triennial Symposium on African Art.
"We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Hollander to our faculty," said Dean Étienne Therioult of the Faculty of Arts. "His research represents exactly the kind of internationally engaged, archivally rigorous scholarship that defines McGill's humanities programs, and his expertise in African visual culture will make a significant contribution to our department's profile in postcolonial and global art history. We look forward to the work he will do here."
Dr. Hollander's own statement on his appointment: "I'm genuinely glad to be at McGill. The questions that drive my research — about how colonial institutions transformed the visual record of the cultures they administered, and what can be recovered from the gaps in that record — feel increasingly urgent, and not only within the discipline. I'm looking forward to working through them with McGill's students, who I expect will push back on my answers in useful ways."
Dr. Hollander will be teaching ARTH 215: Introduction to African and Global Visual Culture and ARTH 440: Colonial Archives and Indigenous Aesthetics beginning this fall. His office is located in Arts West, room 245. He welcomes inquiries from graduate students whose research interests overlap with his own.
About the Department of Art History and Communication Studies The Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University is one of Canada's leading centres for the study of art history, visual culture, and media studies, with particular strengths in global and non-Western art, modern and contemporary art, and the intersections of image, text, and culture.
Media contact: Office of Communications, McGill University Faculty of Arts
His mother called at 8:47, just seventeen minutes after the press release went live on the McGill website.
"Shane." He could hear her smiling. "I just saw the announcement. Your father and I have been showing everyone." A pause in which he could hear her pouring a cup of coffee, followed by steps toward the refrigerator. "Dr. Hollander. It looks very official."
"It is official. That's what a press release is."
"Don't be smart." She said it with a sigh that bordered on affectionate pride. It was the reflexive correction of a mother who had been telling him not to be smart for twenty-six years and had never once meant it. "Are you in the office or still at the new apartment?"
"Office." In fact, he had been standing in his new office for approximately forty minutes, turning slowly and mentally arranging and re-arranging before he even opened the first box of books. The office was smaller than he'd expected — a big desk, two chairs for students, a window overlooking a parking garage, two bookshelves that were still empty, and the dusty chemical smells of institutional carpet and cleaning supplies that he associated with every university building he'd ever spent time in. He had three boxes of books on the floor and a coffee from the cart downstairs going cold on the windowsill.
"And did you eat?"
"I had coffee."
"That's not eating. Shane —"
"Mom."
"I'm just saying. You're starting a new job. You need to eat properly." He heard her sit down. "Are the people there nice?"
This was, he recognized, the leading edge of an actual index of questions that she wasn't totally ready to ask him. Have you made friends yet. Is anyone being unkind to you. Are you managing the social parts. His mother worried in ways she had never learned to disguise well enough to hide from him.
"It's the first day," he said. "I haven't really met anyone."
"What about the person you mentioned? The one in your department you met on your interview?"
"Hayden Pike. He's been here a few years. He came by last week when I came to get my office keys." He picked up his coffee, found it cold, set it down. "He seemed normal."
"Normal is good," she said, clearly hoping for something more to follow. There wasn't. Then: "Your father wants to know if you need anything for the apartment."
"Tell Dad I'm fine."
"He says you always say that."
"Because I'm always fine."
There was a pause filled with that same hope of more. He waited.
"From the press release..." she started. "The part, about studying what was lost. What was —" she paused to quote accurately, switching him to speaker mode so she could see the article, "—recovered from the gaps in that record." Another pause. "That's about Obāchan's things, isn't it. Her ceramics."
He was quiet for a moment. He had not expected this question. His grandmother's ceramics — three pieces that his great-grandmother had managed to keep through the internment years, through the dispossession of the Powell Street house, through four moves in eight years — had been sitting on a shelf in his parents' Ottawa living room for his entire life. He had grown up knowing exactly what they were evidence of without being able to name it and with the official documented evidence intentionally vague. His interest in how colonial institutions processed and (intentionally or unintentionally) misidentified the cultures that they "served" had many origins, and she wasn't wrong that one of them was in that living room.
"Partly," he said.
"I know." Her voice was softer and she paused. Then, suddenly shifting back to her brisk tone: "Well. McGill is very lucky to have you. Your father agrees."
"Tell Dad I said thanks."
"Tell him yourself, he's right here." A shuffle, a muffled exchange. Then his father's voice, unhurried: Hey, kid. Congratulations. Go get some lunch. You have to try that place I showed you near the river.
He laughed despite himself. " I will, thanks, Dad."
His mother came back. "He means it. Go eat something. Call me later."
"I will."
He could hear her thinking.
"Shane. "
"Mom."
"I'm proud of you." She said it quickly and then immediately deflected back to business: "And let us know if you need anything!"
She hung up before he could respond to either part of that, which was probably intentional.
He stood in the office for another moment. The sidewalk outside the window showed two students, backpacks on, clearly people who knew where they were going. He watched them until they were out of frame and then turned back to the box of books on the floor.
The Administrative Eye went on the shelf first, spine out, holding court as the most precious. Then the secondary sources, alphabetically, the way he'd always done it. Then the folders of article drafts, the notebooks from the Paris archives, the flat box of photographs he'd taken in Dakar with his own camera because the IFAN photography permissions had been complicated.
By the time Hayden Pike knocked on the open door at half past ten — holding two coffees from the cart downstairs, looking like a man who had learned through trial and error or maybe an HR seminar how to make new colleagues feel immediately less strange — the shelves were half full and Shane had eaten the granola bar he'd found in his jacket pocket.
"You are official," Hayden said, holding out a coffee. "I saw the announcement go up. They used a good photo."
"My mother called within the hour."
Hayden laughed and Shane thought it was a good laugh. Real. "Mine called within twenty minutes of mine. I think they have a network." He looked at the shelves. "You alphabetize."
"Alphabetically within subject area."
"Of course." He handed over the coffee and leaned in the doorway. "Fair warning — there's a department lunch on Friday. Therioult will make a speech. It's about twelve minutes of your life you won't get back, but the food is good and you should come."
"I'll come," Shane said.
"And there's a grad student mixer next week that you're technically expected to attend for about an hour and then you can leave." He paused. "Or you can stay, if you want. Some of them are actually interesting."
"I'll stay an hour."
Hayden nodded, satisfied, as if a checklist had been completed. "Good." He glanced at the box still on the floor. "You need a hand with that?"
Shane looked at the last box and then at Hayden Pike, who had a coffee in one hand and the undemanding patience of someone who remembered what it felt like to be new.
"Sure," he said.
It was, all things considered, a reasonable beginning.
Later — the books shelved, Hayden gone, the office quietly starting to feel like his — Shane sat at his desk and opened his laptop to the email he'd been not-quite-thinking-about since he woke up that morning.
It had come to his phone at 7:14 AM, which was before the press release, before his mother, before the coffee cart, before Hayden. The sender line read From: Rozanov, Ilya and the subject line was: Congratulations on your appointment.
The body of the email was five words: McGill is a good school.
Shane had been staring at those five words, on and off, since 7:14 AM. He had read them as a compliment, which they were, technically. He had read them as condescending, which they also were, technically. He had read them as the exact thing that Ilya Rozanov would say if he wanted to say something without saying anything at all, which was almost surely the most accurate interpretation.
He had not replied yet. He was still working out whether Thank you was the complete reply or whether it required more, and if more, how much more, and whether Boston University is also a good school was too much, and whether he was spending too much time on five words from a person who had spent the previous four years being his primary professional adversary and who was now, apparently, sending him weirdly courteous emails at seven in the morning.
He typed: Thank you, I thought so too.
He deleted: I thought so too.
He sent it before he could revise it again, and then closed his laptop. It was after 2pm -- time to find lunch.