Dr. Suzanne Gott
University of British Columbia Okanagan, USA
Assistant Professor, Art History

I’ve always had a special interest in global arts and visual cultures. In 1987, I completed a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin with a concentration in Mesoamerican and Hispanic popular arts. At Indiana University, Bloomington, I completed two doctoral degrees in African art and visual culture: a Ph.D. in Folklore in 1994; and an M.A. and Ph.D.in Art History in 2002. From 2000-2006, I was the non-Western art historian in the Liberal Arts faculty of the Kansas City Art Institute, and then a faculty member of Brandon University’s Department of Visual and Aboriginal Arts from 2006-2008.  

My research and publications focus on the art and visual culture of southern Ghana’s Ashanti Region.

I’m particularly interested in exploring issues of gender, comparative aesthetics, display, and performance; and in investigating continuities and/or transformations of precolonial art and aesthetics in colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary art and visual culture.

I approach the teaching of global arts and visual cultures from a broad multidisciplinary range of theoretical, historical, and ethnographic perspectives. I’ve developed and taught introductory and upper-division courses on the arts and visual cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, Native North America, Mesoamerica, and the South Pacific, as well as senior seminars focusing on Western primitivism, Western representations of the ‘other’, and tourist art and global popular culture. As a member of UBCO’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, I’m committed to the development of a more global art history program.