The collection of Albert H. Schwenger (d.1977) represents items collected over a period of years by Mr. Shwenger. He was an avid collector who gathered a wide variety of material including newspapers, photographs, artifacts and documents, dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and generally of the Niagara area. On many occasions, Mr. Schwenger shared his collection with the public through speaking engagements and museum loans.
Joan M. Schwartz is a Professor Emerita from Queen's University. A specialist in photography acquisition and research at the National Archives of Canada for more than two decades prior to her faculty appointment, Joan M. Schwartz brought expertise in archives, materiality, memory, and institutional discourse to her teaching and writing. She was cross-appointed to the Department of Geography at Queen’s and was an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Society of American Archivists, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, she has just been made a Fellow of the Association of Canadian Archivists (2022).
Dr. Schwartz has published and lectured widely in the field of archives, historical geography, and the history of photography, and has served on the editorial boards of The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (2004) and the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth‐century Photography (2007). She co‐edited Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (with James Ryan for I.B.Tauris, 2003) and Archives, Record, and Power, two double issues of Archival Science (with Terry Cook in 2002).
Her research focuses on photography in nineteenth-century visual culture and on the relationship of photography and archives to notions of place, identity, and memory. She has a particular interest in photographically illustrated books and the role of photography in nineteenth-century Canadian nation‐building. With the support of an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, she is engaged in a four-year project entitled, “Picturing ‘Canada’: Photographic Images and Geographical Imaginings in British North America, 1839-1889.”
Donald Mackenzie Schurman was born September 2nd, 1924 in Sydney, Nova Scotia. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force and served as aircrew in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command in 1944-1945. Upon return to Canada he enrolled at Acadia University where he completed a B.A. in 1949, and an M.A. in 1950. He was a member, and fellow, of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 1955, where he attained his PhD.
Upon completion of his doctoral work Schurman taught at the University of Alberta for 1955-1956, and then Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) in Kingston from 1956-1966 at which point he moved to Queen's University. Schurman taught at Queen's University for a decade, during which time he became one of the three founding principal investigators of the Disraeli project as well as the Director of the Institute of Commonwealth and Comparative Studies (1975-1977). Schurman left Queen's University in 1977 and spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of Singapore. Upon his return, he was hired as chair of the history department at RMC, where he stayed until his retirement in 1987. Dr. Schurman passed away in Kingston in June 2013.
Born in Poland in 1921, John Schreiber undertook his studies in Warsaw. At the outbreak of World War II, and following the occupation of his country by Germany, he fled to England in 1940, where he joined the Polish Navy. Following the cessation hostilities, John Schreiber studied architecture at the University of Glasgow, where he graduated with a B.Sc. (Arch.) in 1951. The next year he emigrated to Canada and Montreal. There, he worked briefly with Philip Goodfellow before being appointed to the faculty of the School of Architecture, McGill University. In 1957, he was made Assistant Professor and six years later Associate Professor. During a sabbatical leave in 1963, he received a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University. During his time at McGill, John Schreiber undertook numerous commissions, including the Solominium Building, on St. Mathieu Street, at the corner of Rene Lesvesque Boulevard (across the street from the Canadian Centre for Architecture) in Montreal; and two private residences in the Thousand Islands area: Mr. Robert Hewitt, and Mr. and Mrs. C. Vandendries. John Schreiber currently lives on the banks of the Tay River, outside of Perth, Ontario, in a home designed by himself, and which "sums up a career's worth of ideas about his approach to architecture."