Faculty Profiles

Jana Smith Elford, Instructor

Education & Credentials:

• PhD, University of Alberta (2018)
• MA, University of Alberta (2010)
• BA, Canadian Nazarene University College (2007)

Began teaching at MHC: 2019

Jana Smith Elford's teaching draws from her background in feminist literary and cultural studies, engaging with issues of gender, race, class, sex, and politics. All of her courses reflect a deep interest in the way the texts of particular times and places reflect the culture of those eras, and vice versa: how to trace particular cultures and subcultures in those texts.

Her research focuses on social movement literature, particularly feminist literature ranging from the late-nineteenth century to the late-twentieth century in North America and England. She is particularly interested in employing the methods of feminist digital humanities to trace the way historical social movements are mobilized and sustained. She is currently co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded project AdArchive: Tracing Pre-Digital Networked Feminisms, which explores how linked open data (LOD) might be used to understand and represent feminist publication networks in North America in the late 1970s. Select publications include articles in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Victorian Review, The Victorians Institute Journal, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, and a chapter in Reading Modernism with Machines: Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan).