Dr Elisa deCourcy

Dr deCourcy is an art historian, specialising in early photography. Her ARC DECRA Fellowship project is titled ‘Capturing Foundational Australian Photography in a Globalising World’ (DE200101322) and will run until the second half of 2023. Her scholarship is informed by deep archival research, practice-led investigation and a re-thinking of digital design for heritage collections of photography.

From 2016-2019 Dr deCourcy was the Research Fellow and Research Assistant on two photographically-centred ARC Discovery Projects: ‘Heritage in the Limelight: The magic lantern in Australia and the world’ run out of the ANU School of Art and Design, and ‘Curating Photography in the Age of Photosharing’, co-administered between ANU and RMIT, Melbourne.

In 2018 she was awarded a Harry Ransom Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin and an Australian Academy of the Humanities Publishing Subsidy Award in 2019. Both of these grants contributed to an extended book project, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: the global career of showman daguerreotypist J.W. Newland, co-authored with Martyn Jolly and released by Routledge in January 2021.

Her work has been covered by The Guardian, The Smithsonian Magazine, and The Conversation.