Faculty & Staff

English Language and Literature
Associate Professor
Phone: 902-420-5718
Office: MN326
Email: jennifer.vanderburgh@smu.ca

Research Website

 

Jennifer VanderBurgh (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, where she teaches courses on film, television, media, and cultural memory.

Selected Publication

Monographs

• What Television Remembers: Artefacts and Footprints of TV in Toronto. Forthcoming, McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Margaret Perry and the Nova Scotia Film Bureau Films (1945-1969). In progress.

Essays and Book Chapters

• “Fluid Privilege in Wet Bum (Lindsay MacKay, 2014) and Sleeping Giant (Andrew Cividino, 2015)” in Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium, edited by Charles Tepperman and Lee Carruthers, 120-33. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press: 2022.
• “Grounding TV’s Material Heritage: Place-based Projects That Value or Vilify Amateur Videocassette Recordings of Television.” VIEW: European Journal of Television History and Culture. 8.15 (2019): 59-78. https://www.viewjournal.eu/articles/10.18146/2213-0969.2019.jethc165/
• “Considering Todd’s Tape: The Textual Transition of Videotape Miscellany.” PUBLIC: Art/Culture/Ideas 57, issue “Archive/Counter-Archives” (September 2018): 128-36.
• “Nature Lovers as Nation Lovers in Canadian TV’s The Forest Rangers (1963-65).” In Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods, edited by Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona, 50-63. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2018.
• “Screens Stop Here! Tax Credit Thinking and the Contemporary Meaning of ‘Local’ Filmmaking.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 25, no. 1 (2016): 135-48.
• “Against Ephemerality: The CBC’s Archival Turn, 1989-96.” In Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada, edited by Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, 211-31. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
• “Our Vacant Lot is a Trailer Park: Why Canada’s Perpetual Threat of Disappearing Keeps Film and Television Alive.” In Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada, edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson, 201-16. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.
• “Archive and Canon as Akomfrah’s Muses.” In The mountains, the ocean, and the metropolis: Notes on John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses,” edited by Jerry White, 11-19. Halifax: Centre for European Studies, 2013.
• “(Who Knows?) What Remains to be Seen: Archives and Other Pragmatic Problems for Canadian Television Studies.” In Canadian Television: Text and Context, edited by Marian Bredin, Scott Henderson, and Sarah Matheson, 39-57. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2012.
• “Explaining the Notion of the ‘Essay Film.’” In A Film About the  Sea: Notes on Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space,” edited by Jerry White, 31-35. Halifax: Centre for European Studies and the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, 2012.
• “Toronto’s Aesthetic Turf War and the Look of Rival Film Policies in Monkey Warfare.” In Locating Migrating Media, edited by Greg Elmer, Charles Davis, Janine Marchessault, and John McCullough, 145-58. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010.
• Co-written with Michele Byers. “What Was Canada? Locating the Language of an Empty Archive.” Critical Studies in Television: Scholarly Studies of Small Screen Fictions 5, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 105-17.
• Co-written with Michele Byers. “Trafficking (in) the Archive: Canada, Copyright, and the Study of Television.” English Studies in Canada 36, no. 1 (2010): 109-26.
• “When the Jig Was Up: What Don Messer’s Maritime Nostalgia Meant to the Nation.” In Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada, edited by Darrell Varga, 131-150. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009.
• “Home Movies: Film Archives in the Basement.” On Site: culture, urbanism, architecture, landscape, photography, research 20 (May 2009): 46-47.
• “Imagining National Citizens in Televised Toronto.” In Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, edited by Zöe Druick and Aspa Kotsopoulos, 352-78. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008.
• “Ghostbusted! Popular Perceptions of English Canadian Cinema.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 81-98.
• “Pete and Joey Do Toronto: The Yonge Street ‘Seen’ Scene.” In Culture of Cities: Under Construction, edited by Paul Moore and Meredith Risk, 37-47. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2001.