Elizabeth Legge
Associate Professor, Department of Art History
Areas of interest
- Modern/Contemporary Art
- Dada
- Surrealism
- Contemporary Canadian and British art
Biography
Main Bio
Elizabeth Legge works on Dada, Surrealism, and contemporary Canadian, U.S., and British art. She has written for a number of journals including Art History, Word and Image, and Representations. She has written books on Max Ernst and psychoanalysis; and on Michael Snow’s radical New York film of the 1960s, Wavelength. Her intellectual interests include: the ways that artists have worked with language; and the instrumental uses of religious, racial, and national stereotypes and rhetorics in art. She has been a visiting professor at the Humanities Centre at Johns Hopkins University.
Select publications
- “Pulling it Out of a Hat: Picabia, Gustave Lanson, and Man Ray’s cover for Littérature,” Nottingham French Studies, 62, no. 2 (2023): 158-77.
- "Circling the Computational: Jean-François Lyotard and Michael Snow’s LaRégionCentrale,” in Adam Lauder, ed.Variable Conditions: Para-computational Arts in Canada, 1965-1995 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023).
- “When Awe turns to ‘awww’: Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog and the Cute Sublime,” in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, Joshua Dale, Joyce Goggin, Julia Leyda, Anthony P. McIntyre, and Diane Negra eds. (London: Routledge, 2017). Reprint in Sianne Ngai, ed. The Cute (Boston: MIT, 2022)
- “Boring Cool People: Some British Boredoms,” in Boredom Studies: Postdisciplinary Inquiries. Julian Haladyn and Michael Gardiner eds. (London: Routledge, 2016)
- “Nothing, ventured: Paris Dada into Surrealism,” in David Hopkins ed., Blackwell Companion to Dada and Surrealism (London: Blackwell, 2016) 11,000 words
- Michael Snow’s Wavelength (Afterall/MIT, 2009)
- Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989 (Series: “The Avant Garde”, ed. Stephen C. Foster)