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.