Jennifer Henderson
Professor
- B.A. (McGill), M.A., Ph.D. (York)
- Email Jennifer Henderson
Research Interests
- Canadian literary and cultural studies
- Settler colonialism
- Neoliberalism
- Feminism and gender studies
- Critical media and policy studies
Current research
I am interested in the relationship between literature and liberal government in the settler colonial context, a conjuncture I first examined in Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada (2003). That book describes the contours and contradictions of 19th century liberal feminisms projected onto colonial space. It is also a kind of genealogy of a late 20th-century genre, the woman鈥檚 survivor story.
I continue to move between the 19th and 20th/21st centuries, but I have turned to the child as a figure through which settler-colonial futures and pasts are imagined and normative programs of liberal selfhood configured. This line of research has taken me from turn-of-the-century pedagogies of freedom through play (鈥榩laying Indian鈥), to residential schools, to historical reckoning through the lens of childhood trauma, to the current narratives of 鈥榟uman development鈥 and 鈥榬esilience.鈥 Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress (2013), a collection I co-edited, is about the broader discourses and languages of justice-seeking organized around historical injury today.
In another line of research I am zeroing in on the specificities of neoliberalism in settler-colonial contexts, where the logic of 鈥榩rivatization鈥 is inseparable from colonial histories of imposing the private household, and the overlapping questions of how to govern the poor and the Indigenous.
Recent Publications
Books
. University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Edited Books
(co-edited with Bruce Curtis and Mythili Rajiva) Alison Prentice, . University of Toronto Press, 2025.
(co-edited with Pauline Wakeham) . University of Toronto Press, 2013.
(co-edited with Eva C. Karpinski, Ray Ellenwood, and Ian Sowton) Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.
Translations
Dalie Giroux, . 杏吧原创 Library Series/McGill Queen’s UP, 2023 — translation of Dalie Giroux, L’oeil du ma卯tre. M茅moire d’encrier, 2021.
Chapters in books
“Neoliberal Gothic, Settler Social Imaginaries, and the Case for Decolonization on Two Fronts,” in Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures. Eds. Larissa Lai and Smaro Kamboureli. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023.
“Resilience.” Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, Sage Publications (Oakland, CA: 2020)
Journal articles
“Residential School Gothic and Red Power: Genre Friction in Rhymes for Young Ghouls,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42.4 (2018) 43-66.
鈥淩esidential Schools and Opinion-Making in the Era of Traumatized Subjects and Taxpayer-Citizens.鈥 Journal of Canadian Studies 49.1 (2015), 5-43.
(co-authored with Keith Denny) 鈥淭he Resilient Child, Human Development, and the 鈥楶ost-democracy,鈥欌 Biosocieties, 10.3 (September 2015), 352-378.
Recent Presentations
” ‘Upgrade Life!’: Rupture, Development, and Constellation on the ‘Oblates Lands’ ,” Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons, Toronto Metropolitan University, July 11, 2022.
“Feeling Gothic, Feeling Resilient: Dilemmas of Recursivity and Recuperation in Post-Statist Imaginaries,” Gothic in a Time of Contagion, Populism and Racial Injustice: Gothic-Without-Borders Conference of the International Gothic Association, Simon Fraser University, March 11, 2021.
“Resilience, Indigeneity, and Human Capital as a Nexus of Neoliberal Governmentality,” Canadian Political Science Association, “Resilience, Recognition, Vulnerability, Apology: Logics and Politics of Care in Neoliberal Canada” panel, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of British Columbia, May 2019.
Current PhD supervisions:
Laura Farley Ratcliffe, Doctoral Candidate in English, “Feminism and ‘Folk’: A Cultural History”
Breanna Kubat, Doctoral Candidate in Canadian Studies, “Student Organizing and Institutional Change”