Jennifer Bajorek is a scholar and curator working at the intersection of literature, art, and media, with a linguistic and cultural focus on French and Francophone worlds and a geographic focus on contemporary Africa. At Hampshire she teaches interdisciplinary courses on literature (fiction, non-fiction, and poetry); photography, film, and video; and philosophies of the image and of liberation.
I work across a wide array of cultural texts, objects, and spaces. Beyond writing and teaching, my work includes translation, curating, and diverse forms of collaboration. I have published and taught widely on French and Francophone (Caribbean and African) literature and film, on Marxist and postcolonial theory, and on contemporary art and emerging media practice by artists in Africa and its global diaspora. My research on photography in West Africa includes over a dozen years of collaboration with artists, curators, and museum and heritage professionals in the region. Major projects include a new book, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Duke University Press, 2020); the 3PA: West African Image Lab, a workshop to support preservation in African photography collections, in Porto-Novo, Benin (2014); and Contemporary Africa on Screen (C.A.O.S.), a year-long curatorial program focused on film, video, and performance at the South London Gallery (2010-11). My new research looks at representations of migrants and migration in contemporary Europe.
Prior to teaching at Hampshire, I was senior lecturer in cultural studies at Goldsmiths College, in London, England; since 2013 I have been a research associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
I welcome advising requests from students working in all fields of the humanities and in cultural and visual studies. I am particularly eager to support students working on literature and experimental writing in comparative and cross-cultural contexts, photography, film, and visual studies; those whose work is informed by Marxism, postcolonial theory, African studies, and Black studies approaches; and practitioners whose work incorporates theoretical questions or historical research, regardless of medium.
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