Stephen Longmire

Stephen Longmire's picture
Lecturer in English

Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, IL, March 2010
A.M. General Studies in the Humanities, University of Chicago, IL, June 1990
A.B. General Studies in Humanities, University of Chicago, IL, June 1989 (with high honors)

Stephen Longmire is a photographer and writer whose work focuses on the politics and history of place. His first book, Keeping Time in Sag Harbor (2007), pairs photographs and prose to explore the effects of the recent real estate boom on the historic houses of Sag Harbor, New York, a whaling port turned summer resort and a longstanding site of economic speculation.  Life and Death on the Priairie (2011) also takes a built environment as its subject, one of Iowa’s last and most biologically diverse prairies, Rochester Cemetery, which is perennially in danger of being mowed down.  Both titles explore issues of landscape creation and preservation, and image/text relations.  He is working on a book on the “photo-texts” of the American novelist and photographer Wright Morris, and another on climbing all the High Peaks in the Adirondack Mountains, where he lives.

Longmire has written on the work of fellow photographers for more than twenty years, in publications ranging from Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and The Chicago Reader to The Wilson Quarterly.  His photographs are in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, and Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery. He has taught the history and practice of photography at Georgetown University and Columbia College Chicago prior to teaching non-fiction writing at Yale.