The art of writing and criticism
Erin Silver will return to graduate studies here in the fall.
courtesy erin silver
When Erin Silver was ready to return to school, she approached it differently.
“I decided if I was going to come back, and I was going to do it right.”
She entered the art history program as a mature student after completing only one year of Dawson’s liberal arts program and taking a few years off. She took a course the summer before she started her BA to try to get a jump on things. “After that first class [taught by Denis Longchamps], I knew this was what I wanted to do.”
Art History provided the opportunity to work with art, and to write, two areas important to Silver. Besides her classes, Silver became a Fine Arts student representative at Senate. She was first editor in chief and, the next year, senior editor of the Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History. The journal almost doubled in size during her tenure. She also developed a new template and improved its online presence.
She co-curated sic: Challenging Representations of HIV/AIDS and Illness with Tagny Duff to showcase the work of students in the interdisciplinary course on HIV/AIDS. Her work in that course also led her to publish a research paper: “Missing, Presumed Dead: PWA Portrait-ure and Photographic Depictions of Illness and Death ca. Nineteenth Century.”
Her academic dedication was supported by her decision to become one of the first few Art History students in the co-op program. Her internships led her to work on the Mois de la Photo with professor Martha Langford and for McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Besides earning her the Brian T. Counihan Scholarship for 2006-07, Silver’s dedication has offered her the chance to participate in numerous projects. “It was totally worth it. I was a lot more present and responsible for my own education.”
Although Silver was offered places in grad school at both the University of Toronto and New York University, she has decided to return to Concordia to build on the contacts she’s already made here.
She’s increasingly interested in the city, architecture, desire and autobiography, and wants to explore the relationships among these subjects at the graduate level. So far, her experiences have taught her she’d prefer writing and teaching to administrative work.