Nicole Yung Liao

PhD Candidate
nicole.liao@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Aesthetics
  • Photography
  • Modern/Contemporary
  • European

Areas of Interest

  • History and theory of photography
  • Science and technology studies
  • History of colour
  • Cinema studies
  • Visual culture of the 19th century
  • Biopolitics
  • Colonial History

Working Dissertation

Title

“Truth to Nature”: Synthetic Colour, Biology and Photo Media in the 19th Century

Supervisors

Jordan Bear

Description

This dissertation will foreground the importance of colour in theories of evolution and biology as scientists sought to reveal, magnify and animate life processes in the latter half of the 19th century.

Biography

Honours, Awards and Grants

  • 2024–25 Ontario Graduate Scholarship
  • 2023 International Doctoral Cluster Travel Scholarship, University of Toronto
  • 2022–23 Canada Graduate Scholarship - Master’s Award, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
  • 2022–26 Faculty of Arts & Science Top (FAST) Doctoral Fellowship, University of Toronto

Presentations

“Experiments in Colour Micrography by Fernand Monpillard.” Color Photography in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century: Sciences, Technologies, Empires working group, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), October 15, 2024.
“Animal-Mineral-Vegetable Presence in the Films of Mary Field and Percy Smith.” Movers and Shapers, Animal History Group, online, June 27-28, 2024.
“Malaria, Microbes and Micro-imaging: Detecting the Life of Germs in Fin-de-Siecle France.” Conceptualizing Uncertainty: Reflections on Risk and Disaster in France and the Francophone World (1600-present), University of Toronto, April 15-16, 2024.
“Cinematic Perception and the Undoing of Subjectivity: Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai.” 8th Annual Wolleson Memorial: “Matrix of Mobility: Networks of Objects and Exchange” Symposium, Department of Art History, University of Toronto, March 4, 2021.

Administrative Service

Graduate Union of Students of Art (GUStA) committee member – Social Events and Workshops Coordinator | September 2022 – Present
Anti-Racism Art History Bibliographic Database Project, Database Administrator | May 2021 – August 2021

Cohort

  • 2022-2023