Dr. Michelle Meagher

Area of Study / Keywords

Feminist Periodical Studies Feminist Art and Art History Cultural Studies

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About

I hold a BA in Women's Studies (University of Alberta), an MA in Interdisciplinary Humanities on the Body and Representation (University of Reading, UK), and a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, Virginia, USA. Upon graduating from GMU in 2005, I taught in the departments of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario for two years. In 2007, I returned to my home town to take up a position of Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the U of A. I have served in numerous administrative roles in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, including the role of Department Chair from 2018 to 2023. I currently hold a Vargo Teaching Chair (2026-2029). 

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Research

My research focuses on feminist art and feminist art history with particular emphasis on the late twentieth century North American context. My current interest in this topic centres on the question of time - How do feminist artists represent experiences of time? How do feminist explorations of time contribute to contemporary philosophical and phenomenological approaches to temporal embodiment, and embodied temporality?

With Jana Smith Elford (Medicine Hat College), I am currently editing a special issue of the Canadian scholarly journal Atlantis on the topic of feminist publishing. Also with Jana Smith Elford, I am co-director of AdArchive, a collaborative research project that explores innovative digital humanities methods to better understand and represent feminist publication networks in the late 1970s. Our current research focuses on feminist publishing networks on the Canadian prairies, 1970 to 1990. 

I have further research interests in body studies; feminist cultural studies; ageing and art; feminist generational politics; and the feminist seventies. 

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Teaching

Some of the courses that I am regularly scheduled to teach are:

• WGS 101: Representations of Girls and Women
• WGS 301: History of Feminist Thought

Recent fourth year and graduate seminars include: Writing Social Change (Feminist Print Culture Studies) and Art, Activism, and Social Justice. In recent years, I've supervised undergraduate reading courses and honors theses on feminist crip studies, histories of feminisms of color, and gossip as feminist praxis. I'm always interested to supervise MA and PhD students whose work examines any form of feminist cultural production. 

Beginning in Fall 2026, I hold a Vargo Teaching Chair. Vargo Teaching Chairs at the University of Alberta were created to foster excellence in teaching at the University. This program is committed to support individuals demonstrating innovative and creative teaching methods which enhance learning by undergraduate and graduate students. My Vargo project is titled Fostering Undergraduate Learning Communities. Here is a brief excerpt from the application package:

What would happen if large undergraduate classrooms were supported not only by graduate students, but by undergraduate teaching assistants? Or better yet, what would an undergraduate classroom environment look and feel like if it was offered by a teaching team that included not only an instructor and a Graduate Teaching Assistant but also a team of capable, enthusiastic, and engaged senior undergraduates? These questions reflect the pedagogical curiosity that animates the project. Fostering Undergraduate Learning Communitiesis a three year project that explores how first year undergraduate classrooms can be constructed as diverse learning communities that brings together students who are at the beginning of their undergraduate journey with students who are nearing completion. It is an experiment in instructional design, community building, and learning outcomes. The project expands an successful pilot program (Winter 2026) in which senior undergraduates were brought into a large first year WGS classroom in the role of Tutorial Leaders. As active members of the teaching team, Tutorial Leaders were responsible to attend weekly course planning meetings, attend lectures, support in-class interactive activities, and, most importantly, lead weekly small group tutorials in which enrolled students further explored, applied, and expanded their understanding of course concepts. The vision of the project is (a) to explore how tutorials led by seniors contribute to student engagement in learning communities and (b) to refine the training and support available for professors who may want to reproduce this model in their classrooms. The project explores an instructional model that can improve both the student learning experience and the classroom environment.

I am on sabbatical during the 2026-27 academic year.

GSJ 900 - Directed Research Project

Capping project.

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Browse more courses taught by Michelle Meagher

For almost a decade, I have worked as a curator and director for a small gallery space that is hosted and supported by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. femlab: a feminist exhibition space is a gallery that features a wide range of feminist creative activity. COVID-19 closures have disrupted the gallery's planned exhibitions. 

femlab gallery website

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This is a digital humanities project that has as its main goal the identification, description, and representation of advertising images from Heresies in Linked Open Data. Though underexamined in periodical studies, advertisements provide insight into the economic strategies of social movement magazines. They also reveal the extent to which social movement presses, and in particular feminist periodicals, relied upon periodical networks in order to sustain and advance their projects. 

The first phase of theisualizing Feminist Networks project was a collaboration with Jana Smith Elford at Medicine Hat College, employs linked data to model, understand, and visualize the social, economic, and artistic networks that supported the success of Heresies, an important second wave feminist journal. The project wass generously supported by the KIAS CRAfT Digital Research Archives grant, which enabled us to work with the University of Alberta Libraries (especially the Digital Initiatives Unit) and the Arts Resource Centre. Scholarly writing on the methods deployed in this project will be published in an upcoming issue of International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. 

Phase two, which began in 2022, is AdArchive: Tracing Pre­Digital Networked Feminisms. With Dr. Smith Elford and a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers, this SSHRC IDG-supported project applies models and methods developed in earlier work to a broader range of feminist periodicals. 

Jana Smith Elford and Michelle Meagher

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 2023 November; 42 (2):361-382 10.1353/tsw.2023.a913031

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Jana Smith Elford and Michelle Meagher

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. 2023 March; 17 (1):1-24 10.3366/ijhac.2023.0297

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Kiera Keglowitsch and Michelle Meagher

International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. 2022 January;

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Michelle Meagher and Kylie Burton

Australian Feminist Studies. 2021 May; 10.1080/08164649.2021.1972408

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Michelle Meagher

A Companion to Feminist Art, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. 2019 June; 10.1002/9781118929179.ch10

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Michelle Meagher

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology, Second Edition. 2019 April;

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Tessa Jordan and Michelle Meagher

American Periodicals . 2018 December;

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Michelle Meagher, Roxanne Loree Runyon

Feminist Theory. 2017 January; 18 (3):14 10.1177/1464700117721883

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Michelle Meagher

2015 January;

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Michelle Meagher

Feminist Studies. 2014 January; 40 (1):101-143

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Michelle Meagher

Feminist Media Studies. 2014 January; 14 (4):578-592