Jennifer Jenkins

Professor, English, Film, and Archival Studies

Jennifer Jenkins is a Professor of English, Film, and Archival Studies in the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Her work focuses on media archaeology and the regional cinema history of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands.  Her book, Celluloid Pueblo (UA Press, 2016), tells the story of Tucson-based Western Ways Features and its role in the invention of the Southwest of the visual imagination. She has curated the Puro Mexicano Tucson Film Festival, and she founded Home Movie Day Tucson and the Tombstone Home Movie Project. A longtime aficionada of Mexican cinema, in 2019 she was visiting research professor at the Colegio de San Luis in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, where she led a research group in a study of ephemeral cultural heritage.  She leads the NEH-funded Tribesourcingfilm.com project to repatriate mid-20th century US educational films about Native Americans through recording new narrations from within tribal communities. She harbors a not-so-secret passion for Southwestern and borderlands Home Movies.