Danille Christensen

Danille Christensen, Associate Professor

_{Department of Religion and Culture

105 Major Williams

220 Stanger Street

Blacksburg, VA 24061

540-231-5528 | dec09@vt.edu}

Dr. Christensen (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech, where she is faculty in the Appalachian Studies and Food Studies programs, as well as the Material Culture & Public Humanities graduate program. Using genre, rhetoric, and performance as analytical lenses, she examines the politics of knowledge production about/among marginalized groups in the U.S., especially with regard to material carework. Her writing on ritualized sport, scrapbooks, gardening, indigenous foodscapes, and food preservation can be found in sources that include Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Southern Cultures, and several edited volumes. Her forthcoming book explores the ways home canning has been positioned as a response to threat in the United States, situating the practice amidst shifting ideological and material contexts over the last two centuries. She teaches courses in American studies, Appalachian studies, folklore and folklife, food studies, material culture, and the ethnography of communication.

For further information, please visit Dr. Christensen ’s personal website.

Principal Areas of Research Focus

Gendered/domestic labor
Material culture (foodways, craft)
Performance studies/Ethnography of communication
Cultural and environmental sustainability
Local knowledge

Education

Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington

Professional Roles

Material Culture and Public Humanities MA Program
American Folklore Society
American Studies Association
Appalachian Studies Association
Association for the Study of Food and Society

Awards and Honors

Kluge Fellowship, The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, 2015
Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund for Ethnography Award, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 2012
Charles Redd Fellowship in Western American History, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 2012

Publications

Books and Book Chapters

Freedom from Want: Home Canning in the American Imagination. Under contract, University of North Carolina Press.

“Doing Public Humanities.” In What Folklorists Do: Professional Realities and Possibilities in Folklore Studies, ed. Timothy Lloyd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

“Berries, Roots, Greens, and Seeds: Indigenous Cultivation of ʻWild’ Plants.” In This Is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions, edited by Carol A. Edison, Eric A. Eliason, and Lynne S. McNeill, 86–94. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020.

“Gardening as Placemaking in Utah’s Communities.” In This Is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions, edited by Carol A. Edison, Eric A. Eliason, and Lynne S. McNeill, 184–98. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020.

“‘Good Luck in Preserving’: Canning and the Uncanny in Appalachia.” 2019. In The Food We Eat, The Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables, edited by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt and Lora E. Smith, 132–55. Athens: Ohio University Press.

“Still Working: Performing Productivity through Gardening and Home Canning.” 2018. In The Expressive Lives of Elders, edited by Jon Kay, 106–137. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Open access version available at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dispace/handle/2022/22075

“(Not) Going Public: Mediating Reception and Managing Visibility in Contemporary Scrapbook Performance.” 2016. In Material Vernaculars: Objects, Images, and their Social Worlds, edited by Jason Baird Jackson, 40–104. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Open access version available at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/20925

Journal Articles