Awarded $45,052 over two years, June 2014-2016

SSHRC Insight Development Grant

University Research Fund Competition Award Recipient

University Merit Award Recipient

Busteed Publication Fund Award Recipient

Held a Fulbright Doctoral Fellowship and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Arizona

University of New Brunswick : Elected Faculty Member  Board of Governors

Indigenous Women’s Poetry in Canada: Erotic Transformations

Rethinking Postcolonialism and Canadian Literature Through Diasporic Memory: Reading Helen Humphreys' Afterimage

Revisioning the Dick: Reading Thomas King’s DreadfulWater Mysteries

Reading The Bricklin: Narrating the Place of Dreaming in an Era of Self-Sufficiency

Queer(y)ing Fur: Reading Fashion Television’s Border Crossings

Public Education: What Not To Wear in the United Kingdom and the United States

Re-reading Photographs Through Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal

Revisioning Fredericton: Reading George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems

Thomas King is the first Native writer to generate widespread interest in both Canada and the United States. He has been nominated twice for Governor General's Awards, and his first novel, Medicine River, has been transformed into a CBC movie.  His books have been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The Globe and Mail, and People magazine.  King is also the author of the serialized radio series The Dead Dog Café and is an accomplished photographer.  Border Crossings is the first full-length study to explore King's art.Davidson, Walton, and Andrews employ a framework of postcolonial and border studies theory to examine the concepts of nation, race, and sexuality in King's work.  They examine how King's art routinely explores cross-cultural dynamics, including Native rights and race relations, American and Canadian cultural interaction, and the artistic traditions of Europe and North America. The authors argue that, by situating these concepts within a comic framework, King avoids the polemics that often surface in  cultural critiques. His writing engages, entertains, and educates. This provocative analysis of King's art reads across cultures and between borders, and makes an important contribution to the study of Native writing, Canadian and American literature, border studies, and humour studies.

Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions

How can humour and irony in writing both create and destroy boundaries? In the Belly of a Laughing God examines how eight contemporary Native women poets in Canada and the United States - Joy Harjo, Louise Halfe, Kimberly Blaeser, Marilyn Dumont, Diane Glancy, Jeannette Armstrong, Wendy Rose, and Marie Annharte Baker - employ humour and irony to address the intricacies of race, gender, and nationality. While recognizing that humour and irony are often employed as methods of resistance, this careful analysis also acknowledges the ways that they can be used to assert or restore order.Using the framework of humour and irony, five themes emerge from the words of these poets: religious transformations; generic transformations; history, memory, and the nation; photography and representational visibility; and land and the significance of 'home.'  Through the double-voice discourse of irony and the textual surprises of humour, these poets challenge hegemonic renderings of themselves and their cultures, even as they enforce their own cultural norms.

In the Belly of a Laughing God: Humour and Irony in Native Women's Poetry (Heritage)

Jennifer Andrews’s areas of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century English-Canadian and American literature, Native North American literature, literary theory, border studies, and cultural studies. Jennifer has supervised MA and PHD theses on a wide variety of academic topics including: the poetry studies of Leonard Cohen, English-Canadian short fiction by women, Dionne Brand's poetry, Native adaptations of Shakespearean drama, English-Canadian female fiction writers' use of humour, Douglas Coupland, depictions of female adolescence in Maritime literature, and the increasing conservatism of recent English-Canadian historical novels. She has also supervised several fiction creative theses.

She has published book chapters and articles in a variety of scholarly journals including American Literary History, ESC, American Indian Quarterly, ECW, The Canadian Review of American Studies and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Her co-authored book, Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2003 and her SSHRC-funded book on Native North American women poets, titled In the Belly of a Laughing God, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011. In 2014, she was awarded a $45,000 SSHRC Insight Development Grant to pursue a new project entitled “Americans Write Canada” that explores American constructions of Canadian identities. Jennifer is a former Acting Editor/Co-editor of Studies in Canadian Literature (2001-2002, 2003-2012), and served as Acting Graduate Director from 2011-2012.  She served as Department Chair from 2013 to 2016. Current member of the Graduate Academic Unit.

The following is a selected list of Professor Andrew's accomplishments.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century English-Canadian and American Literature

Native North American Literature

Literary Theory

Border Studies

Cultural Studies

English

French

Comprehensive CV

University of New Brunswick : Faculty Profile

Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review : Author Profile

Faculties at NB universities pass no confidence motions in their administrations

Making Trouble at UNB

Professor, Department of English

Jennifer Andrews is chair of the English department at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.

More about Dr. Andrews' research and teaching: http://www.unb.ca/fredericton/arts/departments/english/people/jandrews.html

More about UNB's English program: http://www.unb.ca/fredericton/arts/undergrad/ba/english/index.html

Jennifer Andrews | Research Snapshot

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