Jennifer Jenkins

Jennifer Jenkins works at the intersections of literature, film, and archives, teaching in both the English department and the School of Information.

Long a heavy user of both literary and film archives, she has integrated archival theory and applied practice into most of her courses, including seminars on Cabinets of Curiosity and Media Archaeology. She is working to develop a polycultural archive of home movies of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. In 2011 she brought the American Indian Film Gallery, a digital archive of over 450 films by and about Native peoples of the Americas, to the University of Arizona. This project is actively engaged in reinterpreting these midcentury educational and industrial films through recording of alternate Native narrations and culturally competent metadata.

Her book on archival film, Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Film Service and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest, was published by University of Arizona Press in 2016. She is studying Mexican Film Studiography, also based on archival records throughout Mexico. She is certified to handle cellulose nitrate film, a Class 4 hazardous substance.