Evans, Jennifer

Jennifer Evans is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Carleton. A historian of contemporary Germany, her expertise includes transnational histories of sexuality, social memory, and visual culture. She also works on the history of populism and authoritarianism, especially as it evolves in social media and memory.

Professor Evans has written books and articles on sexual subcultures in the aftermath of WWII, co-edited two books on same-sex sexuality, and another on the history of documentary photography. These projects are bound together by a particular interest in how history is conceptualized and written, including how categories are imagined and put to use in our analysis of past people, sentiments, and events. She is currently finishing a monograph on social media and vernacular Holocaust memory, while overseeing a multi-year, SSHRC supported project on Photography and the Sexual Revolution. A new project, Hate 3.0, explores the role and function of historical misremembering in populist and far-right discourses in social media.

Alongside her academic writing, she also undertakes collaborative digital projects. Recent examples include the New Fascism Syllabus (www.NewFascismSyllabus.com) and the German Studies Collaboratory (www.GermanStudiesCollaboratory.org). 

Research interests: 20th c. social; Germany and East Central Europe; history of sexuality; comparative nationalisms; Cold War, national identity, and everyday life