Didier Aubert

An associate professor of American Studies and U.S. history at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Didier Aubert obtained his PhD from the Université Lyon 2 (France) in 2001. His thesis explored the role of photographs in the reform discourse of the Pittsburgh Survey (1907-1915). His work on Lewis W. Hine and the survey has been published in the form of book chapters (Images de l’industrie, edited by Denis Woronoff, 2002), as well as articles in journals such as the Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines and Etudes Photographiques. Didier Aubert has also published extensively on contemporary American photographers such as Oraien Catledge (Visual Studies), Larry Fink (Etudes Photographiques), Milton Rogovin (Transatlantica) and David Burnett (Monde-s).

Didier Aubert was co-editor of L’Amérique des images (Hazan, Terra Foundation, Université Denis-Diderot, 2013), a cultural history of pictures in the United States, and Refaire l’Amérique (Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011). In 2009, he edited a special issue of Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines on Progressivism. He is a member of the editorial board of the online dictionary of transatlantic culture, a new project coordinated by the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Versailles University, the University of Sao Paulo and U.C. Berkeley.

Over the last few years, his main project has been an in-depth investigation of the South American pictures found in the United Methodist Church’s “mission albums.” He recently organized a workshop at the Methodist Archives, and published its proceedings on the institution’s website (http://www.gcah.org/resources/photograph-thousand-words). Preliminary results of this ongoing investigation have been published in Spanish (“Exploración, Evangelismo y Panamericanismo en Chile,” in Oscar Brando et al., Navegaciones y regresos, 2013) and English (“Surveys and romance,” IdeAs, 2015).
A recipient of the Florence Ellen Bell Scholarship (Drew University’s Theological School, 2012), Didier Aubert has taught American Studies and the history of photography in France, in the United States (Brown, 2009) and Chile (Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Universidad Diego Portales, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Academia del Humanismo Cristiano, 2009-2011).