Feminist Media Studies Digital Feminisms Performance Art Activism German Culture and Literature Gender and Sexuality Studies
Dr. Carrie Smith is Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of German Studies. Her research is located at the intersection of feminist activism and digital culture, including its practices, products, politics, theories, and communities. 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 six peer-reviewed collections, including Indigenous & German Studies (UTP 2019) and Digital Feminisms (Routledge 2016). She is currently managing coeditor of the journal Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies (2017–2022 with Markus Stock, UTP), past managing coeditor of Feminist German Studies (U Nebraska P 2014–2017), and cofounder of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. She is the codirector of the Digital Feminist Collective research group and is a member of two University of Alberta signature areas, AI4Society and Intersections of Gender.
Dr. Smith served as Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies from 2017–2020. She has held visiting positions at the 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. Her work on digital feminism and awkwardness was supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant (PI), and her article on awkward politics, coauthored with Maria Stehle, won the 2016 Women in German Best Article Prize. In 2015, she received the Faculty of Arts Research Excellence Award (Associate Professor) and in 2013, she received the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award (Early Achievement) and the Provost’s Award for Early Achievement of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.