We are pleased to announce the appointment of Ann Cvetkovich as the new Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies. Cvetkovich arrives at Carleton after a long career at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and inaugural director of LGBTQ Studies. Born in Vancouver and raised in BC and Toronto, she is happy to be returning to Canada after many years in the United States.
Cvetkovich’s areas of research are affect studies and archival studies with a particular focus on the role of feelings in public life and cultural and social approaches to emotional health and well-being. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). She co-edited (with Ann Pellegrini) “Public Sentiments,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, and (with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds) Political Emotions (Routledge, 2010). She has been coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Cvetkovich is writing a book about the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to produce counterarchives and interventions in public history. She also collaborates frequently with artists, including Berlin-based artist Karin Michalski, whose video installation project, The Alphabet of Feeling Bad, seeks to make room for negative feelings, and one version of which features Cvetkovich in a performance lecture. She has also been a killjoy in the processing room of Allyson Mitchell’s Killjoy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House, which has been staged in Toronto and Los Angeles and will be in Philadelphia in October 2019. She has articles forthcoming on both of these projects, as well as on Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience.
Here at Carleton, Cvetkovich is helping facilitate curricular and institutional changes at the Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies that reflect its new status as the home for Sexuality Studies and Disability Studies. Discussions are underway about how to build on the Institute’s intersectional mission and contribute to practices of decolonization, indigenization, and diversity at the university. She looks forward to making the Institute into a hub for feminist and queer research, pedagogy, and institutional change across the campus.