The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that Hannah Jasper has been awarded an Edward E. Hildebrand Research Fellowship for Summer 2025.
Hannah is a PhD student in the History of Art Department. She studies 20th-century visual culture, with a focus on visual serial print media and its relationship to US-based resistance movements. Her Fellowship will support her research into the 1922 film Nanook of the North, which was filmed in the Canadian Arctic with Inuit actors.The film's distribution included promotional materials and immersive theater lobbies displaying Inuit life. Hannah's project, "In the Actual Arctic", explores how those promotional materials dramatically shaped perceptions of the Inuit in the United States. Her Hildebrand Fellowship will allow her to visit the Avataq Cultural Institute in Quebec to access rare photographs of the Inuit actors featured in the historic film, as well as to explore their collection of oral histories.
Hannah's research examines the relationship between aesthetics, authorship, and collective production. She is interested in studying the evident and hidden forms of self-determination and cultural production within independent publications and mass media. She holds a bachelor of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, WBEZ, and UChicago Magazine, and is supported by UC Berkeley’s Chancellor's Fellowship.