I am Associate Vice President (Research), working in the Office of the Vice President (Research and Innovation), where I work primarily with researchers from the social sciences and humanities faculties, Indigenous initiatives, and issues of equity,diversity and inclusion. In the Faculty of Arts, I co-chair the Arts Working Group on Indigenous Initiatives. I am also one of the co-leads of the Faculty of Arts Signature Area on Stories of Change.
Degrees
My research interests include life narratives, Inter-American literature, Indigenous literatures and cultures and contemporary Latin American women writers. I serve on the steering committee for the International Autobiography Association Chapter of the Americas and am a consulting editor for the journal a/b Autobiography Studies.
One of my current research projects, entitled "Wanted: A Life Narrative in Deadwood," takes up the 1939 memoir "Pioneer Days in the Black Hills:Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers " by John S. McClintock alongside current Days of 76 tourism events to explore how how life narrative and heritage tourism are media through which we continually play with the past, reconfigure it, and try to make meanings out of the traces we chose to pick up from it.
20190601 - 20220531
"Wanted: A Life Narrative in Deadwood (SSHRC Insight Grant 2019-2022) examines the “persistent power of nostalgia” (Hirsch and Miller 5) and the affective will to know that drives so much genealogy research, life narrative, and cultural heritage tourism through the specific example of a life narrative from my own family tree, John S. McClintock’s Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers (1939; University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). Research into McClintock’s memoir, its influence on the written and popular history of Deadwood and the Black Hills, and the traces of that history in present day cultural heritage tourism in Deadwood (specifically the Days of 76 events) allow me to explore how both individual acts of memory and collective acts of memory participate in the construction of national narratives on contested lands.