Ruth B. Phillips holds a Canada Research Chair and is Professor of Art History at Carleton University, Ottawa. Her research focuses on the indigenous arts of North America and critical museology. Her books include Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011); Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast (1998); and Representing Woman: Sande Masquerades of the Mende of Sierra Leone (1995). She has served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and president of the International Committee on the History of Art. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Ruth Phillips’ research focuses on critical museology and the Aboriginal arts of North America. She is currently completing a book which examines visual culture as a site of cross-cultural translation in the Great Lakes region which includes an examination of Norval Morrisseau’s  invention of modern Anishinaabe painting during the 1950s. Interested in parallels with other modern arts that developed in Africa, North America and the Pacific during the twentieth century, she organized a workshop at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts that brought together specialists in these arts. The current project developed out of those discussions. Phillips is now extending her research to 20th century Aboriginal modernisms in other regions of Canada.