Dr. Jessica Jacobson-Konefall

Jessica Jacobson-Konefall is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies in the School of Fine Arts, University of Lethbridge. She was previously Assistant Professor of Canadian Art and Theory at the School of Fine Art and Music, University of Guelph. Her research interests include Canadian and Indigenous art, Marxist feminism, Critical Theory, Indigenous and critical race theory, and poststructuralist theories. In her current SSHRC Insight Development project she works with Caribbean-diasporic and Indigenous scholars and artists on analysis of longstanding ancestral cultural forms as they appear in contemporary art and social movement histories in the city of Winnipeg. This project looks at the dynamics of Indigenous, Eastern European, and Caribbean diasporic arts and the city itself as a political ecology and contact zone. Previous SSHRC research projects focused on ecological aesthetics in Treaty 1 and Treaty 3 territory (Manitoba/Ontario) and the work of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore, for whom she acted as assistant, project manager, and archivist from 2013-2018. Her art historical writing is published in many journals and anthologies. Her forthcoming book Terra Insum: On the Ground of Art, Knowledge, and Politics in the Settler Colony, is under review with Manchester University Press’s Rethinking Art’s Histories series. She is a practicing artist.