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.
Her book, What Television Remembers: Artifacts and Footprints of TV in Toronto (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) demonstrates how television both documents and affects lived experience, using case studies of Toronto TV shows and early TV encounters, dating back to the 1930s.
Jennifer’s experience with policies and practices that limit access to TV heritage in Canada has fueled a number of research projects about how TV shows and ephemera circulate outside of archives and institutions, especially on social media and through remediated VHS collection and preservation initiatives. Her research and advocacy projects are dedicated to policy change that facilitates greater public access to television heritage that has been produced with public money and in the public’s name.
Jennifer is also lead researcher on a Halifax-based case study investigating the groundbreaking work and practice of government filmmaker, Margaret Perry, who worked for the Nova Scotia Film Bureau from 1945-1969. This case study is part of a six-year SSHRC funded project titled, “Archives/Counter Archives: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage” (Janine Marchessault, PI, York University). She is also a collaborator on, “Distributed Networks: Media Archeologies of Educational TV in Canada (1945-75),” another pan-Canadian SSHRC-funded project about the history of the use of television in Canadian classrooms.
Jennifer is past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada, the current Undergraduate Coordinator of the Atlantic Canada Studies Program, and Saint Mary’s Coordinator for the Halifax Interuniversity Film Studies Minor. She is a committee member for the Atlantic Canada Studies and Women and Gender Studies programs at Saint Mary’s University, and is an adjunct in the Department of English at Dalhousie University.
What Television Remembers: Artifacts and Footprints of TV in Toronto
“What Television Remembers”: Jennifer VanderBurgh’s examination of the medium’s history in Canada
Work of pioneering Nova Scotia filmmaker Margaret Perry goes under the lens
SMU film professor’s research associated with Venice “Imposter Cities” Exhibition
World Without Limits: Dr. Jennifer VanderBurgh
New exhibit digitizes the works of pioneering Nova Scotia filmmaker
See what New Brunswick life was like around 1940 in the digitized work of a film pioneer
Jennifer VanderBurgh 