I’m currently working at Simon Fraser University, on the traditional and unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations, where I’m an Assistant Professor of Publishing. My research, teaching, and organizing focuses on in the field of publishing and social change, with a focus on four key areas: creating public feminist scholarship, building capacity for scholarly podcasting, addressing barriers to access in Canadian publishing, and understanding the history of magazine publishing in Canada.
My background is in the study of Canadian literature. I completed my PhD in 2013 at TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph, where my research focused on contemporary white Canadian women’s representations of distant suffering. My research on vicarious witnessing, distant suffering, and an ethics of complicity sparked an interest in better understanding the historical formations of Canadian print culture with a focus on the central role white femininity played. I then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta; my project, “Modern Magazines Project Canada,” was a collaborative initiative that took up the call to read magazines as a form of new media technology that, alongside radio and film, helped to shape the emergent consumer-publics of the twentieth century. In collaboration with the University of Alberta Libraries and the Manitoba Legislative Library, I helped to facilitate the digitization of the full run of the Winnipeg-based magazine The Western Home Monthly (1899-1932). My research took advantage of this digitization to explore digital methods for the study of periodicals including topic modeling with MALLET, visualization with R, and interactive timelines. I co-authored a chapter on this topic with Nicholas van Orden, “Remediation and the Development of Modernist Forms in The Western Home Monthly,” is included in the volume Reading Modernism with Machines (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). More recently, I co-edited an essay cluster for Modernity/modernity‘s award-winning Print+ platform; this cluster invited contributors from various disciplinary backgrounds to self-reflexively engage with the digitized Western Home Monthly archive and reflect on how disciplines shape understandings of the magazine as a multimodal object of study.
With Paul Hjartarson and Faye Hammill, I also secured a SSHRC Connection grant for “Magazines and/as Media: Methodological Challenges in Periodical Studies,” a workshop that included international scholars, librarians and digitization specialists, and local magazine writers and editors in discussions of the intersections of periodical publishing and digital culture. The papers from this workshop are published in joint special issues of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 6.2 and English Studies in Canada 41.1. I’ve continued to publish on periodical studies, including an article in Students in Canadian Literature linking the digitization of periodical archives with the banal violence of settler colonialism.
Another primary area of research is the intersection of feminism and new media, particularly the challenges facing women in digital spaces. With collaborators Marcelle Kosman and Clare Mulcahy, I co-edited “WHOOPS I AM A LADY ON THE INTERNET”: Digital Feminist Counter-Publics, a collection of essays and interviews on women activists, artists, and intellectuals negotiating the fraught affordances of various digital publics. Marcelle and I also make Witch, Please, a fortnightly podcast about the Harry Potter world. We’ve spoken about our public pedagogy and ambivalent relationship to fandom in a variety of venues, including the feminist journal Ravishly, CBC Edmonton AM, the Edmonton Journal, and at various fan and entertainment expos around Canada. I have also written about podcasting and fandom for Hybrid Pedagogy and Participations.
In 2017, I started a new podcast, Secret Feminist Agenda, a weekly discussion of the insidious, nefarious, insurgent, and mundane ways we enact our feminism in our daily lives. Through a collaborative SSHRC-funded project with Siobhan McMenemy, Senior Editor at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, the podcast was peer-reviewed for three seasons. The goal of this project was to develop methods for podcasts to be circulated as forms of publicly engaged scholarship in their own right, rather than being understood exclusively as knowledge mobilization. This project has been profiled in University Affairs, and I’ve been invited to speak on my podcasting work and offer workshops at universities across North America. In 2018, I also joined the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership as head of the Podcast Task Force, where I helped to develop The SpokenWeb Podcast, a collaborative podcast that explores the possibilities of audio-based scholarship for engaging with audio archives. I am also part of the programming committee for the Vancouver Podcast Festival.
In March 2020, Siobhan and I were awarded a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant to continue developing our work on scholarly podcasting in the form of the Amplify Podcast Network. This new scholarly podcast network, the first of its kind, will incorporate three new peer-reviewed podcasts. The project will also work to develop best practices for the preservation and discoverability of scholarly podcasts and to increase public awareness of podcasts as a form of scholarly communication.
Since joining the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University, I have further expanded my research on Canadian literature and publishing into the contemporary state of the industry. In February 2018, I co-organized Publishing Unbound, a three-day symposium that brought together authors, activists, scholars, and publishing professionals in Canada to discuss inclusivity and accountability in the publishing industry. My co-edited book, Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018) tackles similar topics, providing a critical and historical context to help readers understand conversations happening about CanLit presently. The Toronto Star described it as “an important collection of immediate responses to [the] fracturing” of CanLit.
For more details about my publications, awards, and teaching experience, see my CV.
Hannah McGregor 