Carol Williams joined the Women & Gender Studies Department and the Department of History at the University of Lethbridge in July 2003. Between 2008 and 2011 she held a tier II Canada Research Chair in Gender and Feminist Studies at Trent University in Ontario returning to University of Lethbridge as Chair of Women & Gender Studies Department in July 2011 a position she held until June 2015. Williams received her PhD. in U.S. and Women's History, and in Women's Studies from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Dr. Williams is a research consultant with an international research project, 2014-2017, titled "Negotiating History: Photography in Sami Culture," sponsored by the Research Council of Norway and University of Bergen faculty scholars, Dr. Siegrid Lien, Dr. Hilde Nielssen and Kjellaug Isaksen.
Williams most recent edited collection is titled Indigenous Women's Work: from Labor to Activism (University of Illinois Press, 2012). Her first monograph, Framing the West: Race, Gender and the Photographic Frontier in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press, 2003) discusses women's roles in nation building and the photographic idea circulated about 'Indian' life used to promote Euro American settlement. Framing the West was awarded the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch's Norris and Carol Hundley book prize in 2004. Her dissertation of the same title won the Lerner Scott Prize in American Women's History from the Organization of American History in 1999.
Her teaching specialties include histories of reproductive rights, behaviours and activism, the Introduction to Women and Gender Studies, women-directed independent documentary and feature global cinema, post-contact North American Indigenous Women's History, and North American Women's History and the histories of women's political and social activism. She has also published extensively on women, art and artists in Canada and the United States.
