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Join us in person for the College of Information Science colloquium brown bag series, featuring Jennifer L. Jenkins, University of Arizona Professor of English and Research Social Scientist at the U of A Southwest Center.
This project-in-progress began with a single photograph in a museum installation, and has grown into an investigation of postwar above-ground nuclear testing outside Las Vegas, with model homes and mannequins staged as "normal" American families to measure (?) the effects of the blast and radiation on U.S. domestic life. It spans photo history, government docs, newspapers, declassified Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Defense reports, and the J.C. Penney in-house newsletter (thus far). Archives and archivists loom large in this journey, being essential sources of information and deep wells of patience with my persistent and ever-evolving questions. The emerging research question may be: How does the staging and subsequent destruction of “normative” American domestic settings illuminate midcentury attitudes toward family, home and notions of Americana deemed worth protecting with nuclear weapons?
About Jennifer L. Jenkins
Jennifer L. 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; and Patrimonio efímero: memorias, cultura popular, y vida cotidiana and El Concepto efímero para los estudios históricos [The Concept of the Ephemeral in the Study of History], both co-edited with Adriana Corral Bustos.
Her current project, Screening Americans: Cinemagoing in the Wartime Southwest looks at how going to the movies shaped Southwestern understandings of America and Americans in polycultural New Mexico and Arizona during WWII.
Header image courtesy LIFE Magazine for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, May 1955 (b/w); Colorized by Greg MacGregor, 2019.