Jessica Dunkin

Office Hours:  Thursday, 11.00-13.00

Biography:

Dr. Dunkin’s research explores the historical intersections between sport/leisure and identity in Canada and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Canoes and Canvas: The Social and Spatial Politics of Sport/Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century North America,” was a feminist postcolonial reading of the annual encampments of the American Canoe Association that was primarily concerned with the ways in which gender, race, and class were mobilized to shape access to and experiences of recreation at the turn of the century. Her current research considers sport, physical education, and fitness activities as key sites for the construction of women’s bodies and subjectivities in Canada in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It takes as its starting point the physical education and fitness programming of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). 

Dr. Dunkin is currently teaching courses on gender and childhood; the history of sexuality; and gender, identity, and embodiment at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. She has also taught undergraduate courses on the history of sport and a graduate course in women, gender, and sexuality.

Selected Publications:

Review of Cities and Sexualities by Phil Hubbard. Canadian Geographer (submitted).

Lead author with Bryan Grimwood. “Mobile Habitations in Canoe-scapes.” In Lifestyle Mobilities and Corporealities. Edited by Tara Duncan, Scott Cohen, Maria Thulemark. Aldershot: Ashgate. (Forthcoming 2013).

“Producing and Consuming Spaces of Sport and Leisure: The Encampments and Regattas of the American Canoe Association, 1880-1914.” In Moving Natures: Environments and Mobility in Canadian History. Edited by Colin Coates, Jay Young, Ben Bradley. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. (Forthcoming 2013).

“Manufacturing Landscapes: Place and Community at Glen Bernard Camp, 1924-1933.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 45, no. 89 (May 2012): 79-113.