Dr Elisa deCourcy

Dr Elisa deCourcy is an art historian and curator, specialising in the history of photography and nineteenth-century colonial art in Australia. Between April 2020- December 2023 she held a competitive Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship. Her DECRA project ‘Capturing Foundational Australian Photography in a Globalising World’ reconsidered the arrival of photography to the Australian colonies and how the technology was experienced during its mid-nineteenth-century decades of practice. It combined archival research, practice-led investigation and consultation with First Nations Communities on heritage collections of colonial photography.

In 2018, Elisa was independently awarded a Harry Ransom Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin and an Australian Academy of Humanities Publishing Subsidy Award. 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 2021. Elisa's work has been published in leading photography journals internationally including, History of Photography; Photography and Culture and Early Popular Visual Culture. She has recently collaborated with Kaurna artist, James Tylor on making a daguerreotype portrait for the re-opening of the National Portrait Gallery, London and with artist, Craig Tuffin, on a series of daguerreotype portraits which meditate on seven Australians’ professional and personal connections with historic photography. Elisa's research has been covered by The Guardian (AU, NZ, and UK), The Smithsonian Magazine and The Conversation. She has been commissioned to write about the photography for The National Portrait Gallery, London; Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; the National Gallery of Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum.

In 2023 she was one of twelve international early-career scholar/curators selected for the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max Planck Institute of Art History, Rome's photography intensive and an invited speaker at the Bodleian Library, at the University of Oxford. Elisa is in the final stages of competing a monograph on early photography in colonial Australia which has been contracted by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press.

BA (Hons. I) PhD

History of photography (19th and 20th century); nineteeth-century colonial art (south Pacific focus); archives and colonial knowledge; art and museum practices and decolonisation.