Jennifer Jenkins

Jennifer Jenkins holds advanced degrees in American literatures and cultures and Information Science. Her work focuses on the 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 Native narrations and culturally competent metadata 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. In 2019, she held the Cátedra Primo Feliciano Velázquez at el Colegio de San Luis in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Publications include 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). She is also Co-PI with David Stirrup (University of York) on the Indigenous Knowledges: a Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practices Pilot.

Her current project is a comparative study of the films screened at wartime isolation camps in the Southwest, tentatively titled Screening Americans: Cinema and Citizenship in Japanese Internment Camps and the Manhattan Project in the Southwest, 1942-46.