Carrie Smith, PhD

Area of Study / Keywords

Intersectional Feminist Leadership Critical University Studies Digital Feminisms Performance Art Activism German Culture and Literature Equity and Racial Justice in Postsecondary Gender and Sexuality Studies

About

Dr. Carrie Smith is the Vice-Provost (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). Her research is located at the intersection of feminist activism with creative production and digital culture, including practices, products, politics, theories, and communities. A second research strand takes up an investment in a just academy to examine scholar-activism and the transformation of leadership through feminist pedagogies. In both projects, she is interested in what happens when inventive structures and infrastructures begin in collaboration. She is author of two monographs: Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Dr. Maria Stehle, MQUP 2016) and Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realism in the German Sixties (UTP 2013). She has also coedited eight peer-reviewed collections, including Transverse Disciplines: Queer-feminist, Antiracist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University (UTP 2022), Indigenous & German Studies (UTP 2019), and Digital Feminisms (Routledge 2016). She has been co-managing editor of three international journals: Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies (2017–2022 with Markus Stock, UTP), Feminist German Studies (U Nebraska P 2014–2017), and Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies (which she also cofounded). She is the codirector of the Digital Feminist Collective research group and a member of two University of Alberta signature areas, AI4Society and Intersections of Gender.

Dr. Smith previously served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 2020–2022, as the Faculty Lead for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion from 2019–2022, and as Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies from 2017–2020. She has held visiting positions at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), University of Potsdam (Germany), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), University of Maynooth (Ireland), and Reed College (Portland, OR), and has given invited talks in the US, the UK, Ireland, Germany, and Canada. She has received awards for her research and teaching.