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Lynda Jessup is Vice Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science (2021-), where she oversees Faculty Relations across the faculty’s 30 departments and interdisciplinary programs. Previously, she was Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science (2014-2021) and Director of Cultural Studies, Queen’s University’s interdisciplinary graduate program (2009-2014). She is a professor of Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Film and Media and is cross appointed with the Cultural Studies program. 

Lynda is a historian of visual culture. Her practice is interdisciplinary, and she has written extensively on Canadian and Indigenous North American visual culture in exhibitions, the history of museums and collecting, and art historiography. She studies visual culture in exhibitions as an extension of historical relationships fostered by the Western system of meaning and valuation within which the dominant, subordinate and marginalized in so-called “Canadian art” have been defined as such. This approach has led to an ongoing interrogation of “the national” as another category of valuation, and to her most recent research on its international dimensions. This work has taken shape, as many projects do, in ways that differ from its conceptualization; beginning as a study of Group of Seven exhibitions as sites of official nationalism, it could now be described more accurately as a study of Canadian art exhibitions – specifically, state-sponsored exhibitions of Canadian art – and their role in managing the field’s historiography (otherwise referred to by the National Gallery of Canada as “the story of Canadian art”) in the face of competing narratives and opposing positions.

Most recently, Lynda’s research focus has expanded to the field of cultural diplomacy, with special consideration to the role of art exhibitions in advancing Canadian foreign policy and international relations. As Director of the , she leads an international team in the process of building a vibrant research network that brings academics and practitioners in the cultural sector into conversation with practitioners and scholars of diplomacy. With the support of a recent SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2019-2025), she led a series research summits focused on . The summits produced three reports: ; ; and Policies as Discourse (forthcoming, 2025).

For more information on her research, visit the Department of Film & Media website.