Emily Morgan

Emily Kathryn Morgan

Position
  • Associate Professor, Department of Art and Visual Culture
Emily Kathryn Morgan is an Associate Professor of Art History at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on histories of photography. Her current project considers visual cultures of industrial-scale animal slaughter and meat production in the United States. Previous research projects have focused on the appropriation of pornographic imagery in American modernist photography; and on photographically illustrated accounts of poverty and street culture in nineteenth-century Britain. She is also engaged in collaborative research with scholars in veterinary humanities, animal studies, and anthropology, examining how representations of animals circulate in animal production industries.

Dr. Morgan’s book Imaging Animal Industry: American Meatpacking in Photography and Visual Culture was published in August 2024 by the University of Iowa Press. She is also the author of Street Life in London: Context and Commentary (MuseumsEtc. 2014). She has published articles in Art Journal, History of Photography, Food and History, and Animal Studies Journal, among others. She received her Ph.D. in History and Theory of Art from the University of Arizona.

Contact

387 Design
715 Bissell Rd.
Ames
,
IA
50011-1066

Education

  • Ph.D., Art History, University of Arizona, 2012
  • M.A., Art History, University of Arizona, 2006
  • B.A., English, Tufts University (Magna cum laude), 2000
  • B.F.A., Studio Art, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2000

PUBLICATIONS

Books

2024  Morgan, Emily Kathryn. Imaging Animal Industry: American Meatpacking in Photography and Visual Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

2014  Morgan, Emily Kathryn. Street Life in London: Context and Commentary. Edinburgh / Boston: MuseumsEtc.

Peer-reviewed articles

2024  Bellet, Camille, and Emily Kathryn Morgan. “Co-valence in Cow-veillance: Sensing Technologies and Human-Animal Affinities in Dairying.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. Published online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01622439241280177

2022  Bellet, Camille, and Emily Kathryn Morgan. “Breed(ing) Narratives: Visualizing Values in Industrial Farming.” Animal Studies Journal 11:1 (2022): 200-255. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.14453/asj.v11i1.9 .

2019  Morgan, Emily Kathryn. “’Those Truly Augean Stables’: International Visions of Chicago’s Packingtown.” Food and History 16:2 (issue date 2018, published 2019): 107-134.

2018  Morgan, Emily Kathryn. “Harry Callahan’s Pornographic Appropriations.” Art Journal 77:3 (Fall 2018): 92-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2018.1530013

2018  Morgan, Emily Kathryn.Waterloo Packer: Selling Slaughter.” History of Photography 42:2 (May 2018), 128-145. DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2018.1500786  

2018  Morgan, Emily Kathryn. "Striking Images: Photographs of Iowa Packinghouse Labor Conflict, 1948-1960.” Annals of Iowa 77:2 (Spring 2018): 151-189. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.12500

Book chapters  

2018  Morgan, Emily Kathryn. “’True Types of the London Poor’: Street Life in London’s Transitional Typology,” in Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Practices and Global Contexts, eds. Lynda Klich and Tara Zanardi. New York: Routledge, 2018: 121-134.

2014  Morgan, Emily Kathryn. “Preface,” Street Life in London, by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith. Rpt. Edinburgh / Boston: MuseumsEtc.    

 

INVITED PRESENTATIONS

2024  “Imaging Animal Industry,” Symposium on the Intersection of Art and Medical Humanities, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, June 19-21.

2022  “Photographing Industrial Slaughter in Chicago’s Packingtown,” American Meat Science Association Webinar Series, May 24. Recording available at https://meatscience.org/publications-resources/webinars/webinar/photographing-industrial-slaughter-in-chicago's-packingtown

2020   “Selling Meat to Mrs. Consumer in Midcentury America,” Feminist Fridays Lecture Series, Margaret Sloss Center for Women and Gender Studies, Iowa State University, Oct. 23

2020   “Picturing Packing: Commercial Visions of the American Meat Trade,” Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series, Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, Iowa State University, Jan. 24.

2019   “Imaging Animal Industry: Visualizing the American Meatpacking Trade,” Visual Studies Research Institute, University of Southern California. Part of the VSRI lecture series "Selling the Story: Commercial Pictures and Visual Persuasion,” co-sponsored by VSRI and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dec. 5.

 

SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

2024  “What About the People?”: Visions of Mechanization in Meatpacking Magazines,” Photography and Magazines Symposium, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC, Nov. 1

2024  “Meet Martha Logan: Beauty and Domesticity in Industrial Home Economics,” Beauty Investigated: Dilemmas, Projects and Promises, Iowa State University, Feb. 16

2023  “Rendering Rendering: Photographing Animal Extraction,” College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, Photography Network sponsored session, New York, NY, Feb. 15

2021  “’You are Walking Through Blood Now’: Routine and Rupture in the Packinghouse,” British Animal Studies Network (BASN), Virtual conference, April 16.

2021  “’The Hog-Squeal of the Universe’: Photographing Industrial Slaughter," College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, Feb. 10-13; virtual panel discussion Feb. 11

2019  “Mastering Animal Bodies: Perspective as an Organizing Principle in Packinghouse Photographs.” Creaturely Ethics, Poetics, and Animal Studies panel, 11th Critical Management Studies Conference, Milton Keynes, UK, June 28

2017  “Photography and the Rise of a Global Trade in Meat,” European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art (ESNA) Annual Conference, Antwerp, Belgium, June 9

2016  Waterloo Packer: Sanitizing Slaughter,” Southeast College Art Conference (SECAC), Roanoke, VA, October 20

2016  “Travels in the Sanitary Landscape: St. Louis and Chicago, 1904,” College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, Washington, D.C., February 3

2015  “City Pictures: Harry Callahan’s Urban Photographs,” Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), Pittsburgh, PA, October 24

2014  “Harry Callahan as Teacher and Mentor,” Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), Sarasota, FL, October 9 

2013  “’True Types of the London Poor’: Street Life in London’s Transitional Typology,” Fashioning Identities Symposium, Hunter College, City University of New York, 18-19 October

2013  “Collaboration and Conflict in Street Life in London,” European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art (ESNA) Annual Conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 22-23 May

2012  “Re-envisioning the Working Class in Street Life in London,” Midwest Victorian Studies Association Conference, Bloomington, IN, April 20

2010  “’The Dignity of Disinfection’: The Labor and Rhetoric of Disease Containment in Street Life in London,” College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art sponsored session, Chicago, IL, February 11