Jennifer Jenkins

Jennifer Jenkins holds advanced degrees in American literatures and cultures and Information Science. Her work focuses on the archival and community-based histories, literatures and visual cultures of the Southwest and Mexico, with special emphasis on the cinema history of the region. Curatorial work includes the Puro Mexicano Tucson Film Festival, and exhibits at the Arizona Historical Society and the UA Museum of Art. She is the founder of Home Movie Day Tucson and the Tombstone Home Movie Project as part of an archive of amateur and locally-made films of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. In 2011 she brought a digital archive of over 450 films by and about Native peoples of the Americas to UA. This project is actively engaged in Tribesourcing: reinterpreting midcentury educational and industrial films through recording alternate narrations from within Native communities. This project was awarded a 2017 NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant and a 2022 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. As director of the Bear Canyon Center for Southwest Humanities, she works to preserve and disseminate the arts, literatures, and visual cultures of the region. She is also Co-PI with David Stirrup (University of York, UK) on the Transatlantic Indigenous Knowledges: a Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practices Pilot. In 2019, she held the Cátedra Primo Feliciano Velázquez at el Colegio de San Luis in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.  She is a 2024 CUES Distinguished Fellow.

Publications include numerous essays and book chapters on genre film, Hitchcock, and US and French literary film adaptations; the monograph  Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest (U Arizona  Press, 2016); and Patrimonio efímero: memorias, cultura popular, y vida cotidiana (COLSAN, 2021), and El Concepto efímero para los estudios históricos [The Concept of the Ephemeral in the Study of History] (COLSAN, 2024), both co-edited with Adriana Corral Bustos. 

Her current project, Screening Americans: Cinemagoing in the Wartime Southwest, is a cross-cultural analysis of how going to the movies shaped Southwestern understandings of America and Americans in polycultural New Mexico and Arizona during WWII.

Degrees

B.A. Honors, English, University of Arizona

A.M., English, University of Chicago

Ph.D., English, University of Arizona

M.A., Library and Information Science, University of Arizona

Graduate Certificate in Archival Studies 

Affiliate Faculty

School of Art; Applied Intercultural Arts Research GIDP; American Indian Studies GIDP; School of Information; Institute for the Environment; Latin American Studies.

Scholarship and Creative Activity

Books

Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest. Tucson: UA Press, 2016.

Patrimonio Efímero Compartido: Memorias, Experiencias, Cultura Popular y Vida Cotidiana. [Comparative Ephemeral Heritage: Memories, Experiences, Popular Culture, and Daily Life]Eds. Adriana Corral Bustos and Jennifer Lei Jenkins. El Colegio de San Luis, Mexico, 2021. ISBN: 978607794539

El Concepto efímero para los estudios históricos [The Concept of the Ephemeral in the Study of History]. Cuadernos del Centro. El Colegio de San Luis, Mexico, 2024. ISBN 978-607-8906-61-1

Chapters in Scholarly Books

“Territorial Imperative: The Dark Landscape of the Body in Psycho and Frenzy.” Hitchcock Noir.  Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2024.

“’I’m a solitary panther’: Nelly Kaplan’s Art Films.” The Other French New Wave Volume 1: Forgotten Directors. Ed. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb, Charlie Michael, and Barton Palmer. Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2024. 

“La Banda del automóvil gris and Mexican Modernity.” A Teaching Companion to Silent Cinema. Edited by Liz Clarke and Martin Johnson. Routledge, forthcoming 2024.

“Adaptation as Mutation: In Cold Blood.” The Literary Cinema of Richard Brooks. Edited by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer. Edinburgh University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781474496575. 

“El cine como consonante del espectáculo en el norte de México y el sudoeste de Estados Unidos (San Luis Potosí y Tucson en la primera mitad del siglo XX).” With Armando Hernández Soubervielle.  Patrimonio Efímero Compartido: Memorias, Experiencias, Cultura Popular y Vida Cotidiana. Eds. Adriana Corral Bustos and Jennifer Lei Jenkins. San Luis Potosí, Mexico: El Colegio de San Luis, 2021. 

English title: Cinema as Spectacle in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States (San Luis Potosí and Tucson in the first half of the 20th century).

“The Spectacle of Monte Cristo.” French Literature on Screen. Edited by R. Barton Palmer and Homer B. Pettey. Manchester University Press, 2019: 12-31. DOI: 10.7765/9781526133151.00008

“Success and the Single Girl: Urban Romance and the Working Woman.” Cold War Film Genres. Ed. Homer B. Pettey. Edinburgh University Press, 2018: 181-203. ISBN: 9781474412940

“Sounding Modern Identity in Mexican Film.” With Janet L. Sturman. Cultural Nationalism and Ethnic- Popular Music: Indigenous Opera, Dance Dramas, Popular Songs, and Movie Soundtracks. Ed. William Beezley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018: 227-253. ISBN: 9780826359766

"Archiving the Ephemeral Experience." In Recent Advances in Archival Knowledge. Edited by Karen F. Gracy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017: 77-93. ISBN: 978-1-4422-7515-7

“Exhibiting America: Moving Image Archives and Small Libraries.” In Rural and Small Public Libraries: Challenges and Opportunities. Ed., Brian Real. Advances in Librarianship. Emerald Insight Publishing, 2017. DOI: 10.1108/S0065-283020170000043008  [Invited]

“Rural and Small Libraries: the Tribal Experience.” With Herman Peterson, Kari Quiballo, and Rhiannon Sorrell. In Rural and Small Public Libraries: Challenges and Opportunities. Ed., Brian Real. Advances in Librarianship. Emerald Insight Publishing, 2017. DOI: 10.1108/s0065-283020170000043009. [Invited]

“‘Wonderful and Incomparable Beauty’: Adapting Period Aesthetic for The Importance of Being Earnest.” Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama, ed., R. Barton Palmer and Marc Conner. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. NY: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2017: 103-120. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40928-36

“The Philosophy of Marriage in North by Northwest.” Hitchcock’s Moral Lens. Ed., R. Barton Palmer, Homer B. Pettey, and Steven Sanders. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017: 253-269. Paperback, 2018. https://www.worldcat.org/isbn/9781438463865

Grants and Contracts

“Tribesourcing Southwest Film: Digital Repatriation.” Digital Humanities Advancement Grant: Level III. NEH. 2022-25. [100%] [$324,572]

“Indigenous Knowledges: a Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practices Pilot.” Joint NEH-AHRC US-UK initiative, New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions. Diné College, Wellcome Collection, University of Arizona, University of Kent. 2022-23. [50%] [$50,000 USD; £60,000 BPS]

“Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, Palimpsest of Cultures.” NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Education Grant. Co-PI with Jeffrey M. Banister. [50%] $190,000. Funded 2021-23.

“The Afterlife of Film: Upgrading and Tribesourcing Southwestern Materials in the American Indian Film Gallery.” NEH Collection Development and Reference Resources Grant. [$349,343 requested; $291,000 funded], 2017- 2020.

“Repatriation and Tribesourcing of Yaqui Easter Films from 1972.” Faculty Research Grant. UA Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy, 2016.

“Locally-made Treasures of the University of Arizona 16 mm Collection, Phase II.” National Film Preservation Foundation Grant, 2015-16. [$20,236]

“Locally-made Treasures of the University of Arizona 16 mm Collection.” National Film Preservation Foundation Grant, 2014-15. [$18,308].

Media

“Tribesourcing Southwest Film,” with Rhiannon Sorrell, Indigenous Knowledges in Digital Spaces 2-day webinar, hosted by Wellcome Collection (UK) as part of an NEH-AHRC collaborative US-UK grant, April 12-13, 2023.

“Tribesourcing Southwest Film,” Polyphonic Communities Exhibition, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca College/NYU Abu Dhabi, March 20-April 7, 2023. 

“Past Imperfect: The American Indian Film Gallery Resets the Historical Record,” by Tim Vanderpool, Arizona Alumni Magazine, Fall 2021, 47.

"Webinar 5: Mukurtu & Tribesourcing Southwest Films," remote presentation with Melissa Dollman and Rhiannon Sorrell, for Community Archiving Workshop (CAW), June, 2021.

“Tuesdays with Haury” feature on Tribesourcing Southwest Film, Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environmental and Social Justice, Arizona Institute for Resilience, University of Arizona, April 27, 2021. https://mailchi.mp/ab60b3f1180f/tuesdays_with_haury_042721

“Tribesourcing Film Project” - Augmented Humanity Podcast, June 2020, New Mexico Humanities.  4 episodes. https://nmhumanities.org/NMHC.php?c=1541

“Tribesourcing Southwest Film: Providing Context Through Centering Indigenous Voices.” Protocols Webinar Series (3). Native American Archives Section (NAAS), Society   of American Archivists, May 2020, Sustainable Heritage Network. Rhiannon Sorrell, Crystal Littleben, Melissa Dollman, and Jennifer Jenkins. https://tinyurl.com/t6k8mxdd

Courses

Spring 2025

ENGL 424: Studies in Southwest Literatures

ENGL 524: Studies in Southwest Literatures

Fall 2024

ENGL 300: Literature and Film: Tim Burton, American Auteur

Fall 2023  

ENGL 380: Literary Analysis

ENGL 379: Literature and Film: Representations of the Southwest

Spring 2023

ENGL 565 19th Century American Narrative

Fall 2022

ENGL/M AR 400: Literature and Film: History of Film 

ENGL 496A Senior Proseminar: Museums, Archives and Cabinets of Curiosity 

Spring 2022

ENGL 396A Junior Proseminar: Literature as Cabinet of Curiosity: Theory and Practice 

ENGL/AIS/MAS 524 Studies in Southwest Literatures

Fall 2021

ENGL/AIS/MAS 424 Studies in Southwest Literatures 

Spring 2021

ENGL 373B: British and American Literatures, 1660-1901 

Fall 2020

ENGL 596K Methods and Materials of Literary Research F20

ENGL 373B: British and American Literatures, 1660-1901