Emily Gann, PhD

Biography

Emily Gann (she/her) is the director of the curatorial division at Ingenium. She leads Ingenium’s Research Institute which engages communities, students, researchers, and scholars with Ingenium’s unique knowledge, collections, and ongoing research efforts. Through this work, Emily is committed to ensuring that Ingenium’s national collection is accessible. She teaches at both Carleton University and Bishop’s University, and oversees Ingenium’s fellowship and internship programs. She developed the gender, science, and technology fellowship with the University of Ottawa, and the queer histories of industrial labour fellowship with Concordia University.

Emily works with the transportation collection, which includes technologies of land and marine transport and mobility. Her research in this collection area is focused on access, with express attention to the ways that people have engaged with, understood, and shaped these technologies. Notably, she brings a critical feminist lens to this work in order to reconsider how access, gender, and design have influenced and been impacted by transportation technologies and networks. She recently completed her dissertation at the University of Ottawa in Feminist and Gender Studies. This work, entitled Users, Gender, and Access: The History of Public Transportation in Ottawa from 1891 to 2011, engages with the material culture of mobility in order to examine the reciprocal relationship between users and technology. Emily has curated permanent, temporary, and travelling exhibitions, including Technology in Our Lives, Moving Stories, and Iron Willed: Women in STEM. She has also supervised a number of digital storytelling projects, including: Locomotives and rolling stock at the Ingenium Centre, and Artifacts soundscape tour.