Jody Berland
Professor Emerita
Member, Graduate Programs in Humanities, Communications and Culture, Social and Political Thought, Interdisciplinary Studies
Senior Scholar
Office: 232 Vanier College
Phone: 416-736-2100
Email: jberland@yorku.ca
Primary website: Jody Berland York University
Secondary website: yorku.academia.edu/JodyBerland
Attached CV
Media Requests Welcome
Jody Berland is an award winning scholar whose research and teaching offer interdisciplinary explorations of weather and climate, human-animal relations, cultural studies, media theory, music and technology, feminism and disability, and social change. Her most recent book, Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in in Network Cultures (MIT Press, 2019) addresses the role of animal emissaries or mediators from early European colonial endeavours to the emergence and proliferation of animal images and sounds in digital networks. She is Editor Emerita of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and has supervised many theses and dissertations. Her current research concerns bird song in sound recording and literature; extinction aesthetics; climate change knowledges and absences; reading and teaching the Anthropocene.
Jody Berland has published widely on cultural studies and on mediations of music, space, weather, animals and environments. Her most recent research explores representations of animals as connective mediations in historical, colonial , literary, and digital milieux.
Professor Berland is the co-editor of <Cultures of Militarization (2010); Theory Rules: Art as Theory/Theory and Art (1996); Cultural Capital: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions and the Value(s) of Art (2000); and Editor Emeritus of Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (www.yorku.ca/topia). Her book North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (2009) explores changing relations between nation, technology, nature and culture in Canada. This book was awarded the Gertrude J Robinson Book Prize by the Canadian Communications Association, 2010. Berland was also awarded the Association of Canadian Studies 2010 Merit Award.
Berland's 2009-2012 SSHRC funded research, 'Virtual menageries in network cultures' concerns the importance of animals in the emergence of new international relations and media technologies. Her book Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures was published by MIT Press / Leonardo Books. In 2015 she was awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant as principal investigator of an international project entitled "Digital Animalities: Representations of Non Human Life in the Age of Risk" amounting to $300,250.00. The team has produced a website, an art exhibition, "Digital Animalities," curated by Matthew Brower (University of Toronto) and Giovanni Aloi (Chicago Art Institute), an exhibition catalogue, edited by Matthew Brower and published by Public; and a book anthology, forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press, co-edited with Thomas Lamarre (University of Chicago).
Professor Berland has supervised 13 PhD dissertations and 23 MAs and currently supervises 4 PhD and 2 MA students. Completed PhD supervisions: Kelsey Speakman (Communication and Culture, 2024), "Mediating Meat: Buying and Selling Beef in Canadian Supermarkets." Brian McCormack (Humanities, 2018), "Among Umwelten: Meaning-Making in Critical Posthumanism." Neil Balan (Humanities, 2015). “Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower and the Collateralization of Military Violence.” Steven Logan (Communication and Culture, 2015). “Modernist Urbanism in the Era of Automobility: Producing Space in the Suburbs of Toronto and Prague.” Sabine Lebel (Communication and Culture, 2014). “Life Cycle of a Personal Computer: Studies in the Materialities of Risk.” Kelly Bronson (Communication and Culture, 2013). “Framing the Debate: How Scientism in the Language of the Law binds Public-Biotechnology Engagement.” Robinder Kaur Sehdev (Communication and Culture, 2008), “Liliwanna at the Brink: Visual Culture and Colonial History at Niagara Falls.” Naomi Fraser (Communication and Culture, 2007). "We Are All Connected: Internationalism and Canadian Identity." Sarah Ravi Sharma (Communication and Culture, 2006). "Temporality and Difference from the Agora to the Airport: Towards a Theory of Power- Chronography." Melissa West (Communication and Culture, 2006). "Marketing Madonna: Commodity and Corporation." Jenny Burman (Social and Political Thought, 2000). "Global Flows: Economies of Nostalgia and Yearning." Cheryl Simon (Humanities, Concordia University, 1998). "Gender, Genre and Globalization: Discourses of Femininity in the Popular Culture of the 1990s." Adrian Ivachiw (Faculty of Environmental Studies, 1997). "Places of Power: Sacred Sites, Gaia's Pilgrims and the Politics of Landscape."
Current PhD students: Sean Steele (Humanities) Improvising the sacred: Music festivals and spiritual experience; Ferg Maxwell (Communciation and culture) , Forest fires, nature tourism and the algorithms of social media; Ryan Forster (Social and Political Thought) Theorizing politics in the Anthropocene: Marxist and new materialisms; Mauricio Callao Quvedo (Social and Political Thought), Anthropocene and extraction in geological contexts. Postdoctoral Supervision: Trudi Smith, 2011-2013. “Critical and creative visual inquiry grounded in contemporary acts of photography in Canadian National Parks.”
Courses taught include: Animals in Human Cultures, Interdisciplinary Perspectives; Culture and Modernity; Culture and Technology; Encountering the Other; Communication Theory; Interfaces: Humans and Machines; Images of Animals; Reading the Anthropocene
Degrees
PhD in Social and Political Thought, York UniversityMA, "Special Arrangements" (Interdisciplinary Studies), Simon Fraser University
BA in English and Sociology, Simon Fraser University
Appointments
Faculty of Graduate StudiesProfessional Leadership
Communications Officer, York University Faculty Association
Co-Founder, YUFA Climate Emergency Committee (YCEC); Co-Chair, YCEC Curriculum Committee
Member of Editorial Board, IASPM (International Association for the Study of Music) Journal
Senior Faculty Associate, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies
Editor Emerita, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Community Contributions
Convenor and web manager, TAB: Take Academia Back. https://www.facebook.com/groups/622766154521199
Steering Committee member, Politics of Evidence Working Group. https://politicsofevidence.wordpress.com
Member and contributor, Friends of a New Park, community group behind Wychwood Artspace.
Member, SCAN! Seniors for Climate Action Now!
Research Interests
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
An interdisciplinary collaborative study of animals in digital media in the context of environmental risk with 10 co-investigators and collaborators.
Start Date:
- Month: Jul Year: 2015
End Date:
- Month: Jun Year: 2019
Funders:
SSHRC
-
Summary:
A study of the use and impact of animals in new media sites.
Description:In completion at Goldsmiths, University of London. https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=10293
Published as Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures. Leonardo Books, MIT Press, 2019.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/virtual-menageries
- Month: Jul Year: 2012
End Date:
- Month: Jun Year: 2015
-
Summary:
Editor, Editor Emeritus
Description:Editor, 1998-2015, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal in cultural studies.
-
Summary:
Annual publication of Canada Watch, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, 2014
Description:A publication dedicated to an examination of the politics of evidence and the status of science under the Canadian Conservative Government.
Berland, Jody. Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures. MIT Press / Leonardo Books
Cultures of Militarization, Ed. Jody Berland and Blake Fitzpatrick. TOPIA/Cape Breton University Press, 2010.
Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art. Ed. Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000.
Theory Rules: Art and Theory/Theory as Art. Ed.Jody Berland, Will Straw and David Tomas. YYZ Books; University of Toronto Press, 1996.
Jody Berland, "Havoc Ornithologies." Ch. 24, Edinburgh Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Helen Goth and Julian Murphet, 2023
“Cat and Mouse: Iconographies of Nature and Desire.” Human Animal Studies, ed. Susan McHugh and Garry Marvin. London: Routledge (in press). Reprint.
“The Work of the Beaver.” Material Cultures in Canada. Ed.Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair. Waterloo: Wilfrid University Press 2015.
Contradicting Media: Toward a Political Phenomenology of Listening.” The Sound Studies Reader. Ed. Jonathan Sterne. London: Routledge, Reprint.
“Cat and Mouse: Iconographies of Nature and Desire. Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Ed.), Cultural Studies and the Environment, Revisited. London: Routledge
'Writing on the Border.' Between Empires: A Canadian Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Gail Faurchou, Sourayan Mookerjea and Imre Szeman. Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
'Postmusics.' Sonic Synergies. Ed. Gerry Bloustein. London: Palgrave, 2008. 35-45.
'Space at the Margins: Colonial Spatiality and Critical Theory after Innis.' Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art. Ed. John O’Brian and Peter White. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. 89-92.
'The Musicking Machine.' Residual Media. Ed. Charles Acland. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 303-328.
“Radio Space and Industrial Time: The Case of Music Formats.” Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Ed. Simon Frith. London: Routledge, 2003, 230-239. Reprint.
“Bodies of Theory, Bodies of Pain: Some Silences.” Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000. Eds. Hilary Robinson, Blackwell Press, 2001, 75-84.
”Nationalism and the Modernist Legacy: Dialogues with Innis.” Capital Culture. Eds. Berland and S. Hornstein. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.
“Cultural Technologies and the 'Evolution' of Technological Cultures.” The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. Eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss. London: Routledge, 2000, 235-258.
“Das Wetter und wir. Wie Nature und Kultur sich miteinander vershranken,” in Widerspenstige Kulturen: Cultural Studies als Herausforderung. Eds. Karl H. Norning and Rainer Winter. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999 (translated), 543-566
“Weathering the North: Climate, Colonialism and the Mediated Body.” Pop Can: Popular Culture in Canada. Eds. L. Van Luven and P. Walton, Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1999, 207-218.
North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Received the 2009 Gertrude J Robinson Book Prize by the Canadian Communication Association.
Berland, Jody. McLuhan and Posthumanism: Extending the Techno-Animal Embrace. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2019v44n4a3725
Berland, Jody “McLuhan and Posthumanism: Extending the Techno-Animal Embrace.” Canadian Journal of Communications, Fall 2019.
“Assembling the Virtual Menagerie,” Antennae: Journal of Nature and Culture #30, December 2014, 54-71. www.antennae.org.uk
“The Politics of Evidence: The Contemporary Canadian Context.” MediaTropes eJournal, 5.2. Ed. Jenny Bosaller. University of Missouri, 2015.
'Animal and/as Medium: Symbolic Work in Communicative Regimes.' Global South 3.1 (Spring 2009): 42-65.
"The Elephant in the Classroom." International Journal of Inclusive Education 13:7 (2009): 799-811.
"The Politics of the Exasperated: Arts and Culture in Canada." ESC: English Studies in Canada 33.2 (2009): 24-30.
'Cat and Mouse: Iconographies of Nature and Desire.' Cultural Studies 22.2 (Spring 2008): 431-454.
Walkerton: The Memory of Matter.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (Fall 2005): 93-108.
“After the Fact: Spatial Narratives in the Canadian Imaginary,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory Politics 57 (2005): 39-55.
“Nationalism and the Modernist Legacy: Dialogues with Innis” Culture and Policy 8.3 (1997): 9-37.
On Reading `the Weather. Cultural Studies 8.1 (January 1994): 99-114.
“Writing on the Border.” CR: The New Centennial Review 1.2 (2001): 139-170.
Jody Berland is an award winning scholar whose research and teaching offer interdisciplinary explorations of weather and climate, human-animal relations, cultural studies, media theory, music and technology, feminism and disability, and social change. Her most recent book, Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in in Network Cultures (MIT Press, 2019) addresses the role of animal emissaries or mediators from early European colonial endeavours to the emergence and proliferation of animal images and sounds in digital networks. She is Editor Emerita of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and has supervised many theses and dissertations. Her current research concerns bird song in sound recording and literature; extinction aesthetics; climate change knowledges and absences; reading and teaching the Anthropocene.
Jody Berland has published widely on cultural studies and on mediations of music, space, weather, animals and environments. Her most recent research explores representations of animals as connective mediations in historical, colonial , literary, and digital milieux.
Professor Berland is the co-editor of <Cultures of Militarization (2010); Theory Rules: Art as Theory/Theory and Art (1996); Cultural Capital: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions and the Value(s) of Art (2000); and Editor Emeritus of Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (www.yorku.ca/topia). Her book North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (2009) explores changing relations between nation, technology, nature and culture in Canada. This book was awarded the Gertrude J Robinson Book Prize by the Canadian Communications Association, 2010. Berland was also awarded the Association of Canadian Studies 2010 Merit Award.
Berland's 2009-2012 SSHRC funded research, 'Virtual menageries in network cultures' concerns the importance of animals in the emergence of new international relations and media technologies. Her book Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures was published by MIT Press / Leonardo Books. In 2015 she was awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant as principal investigator of an international project entitled "Digital Animalities: Representations of Non Human Life in the Age of Risk" amounting to $300,250.00. The team has produced a website, an art exhibition, "Digital Animalities," curated by Matthew Brower (University of Toronto) and Giovanni Aloi (Chicago Art Institute), an exhibition catalogue, edited by Matthew Brower and published by Public; and a book anthology, forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press, co-edited with Thomas Lamarre (University of Chicago).
Professor Berland has supervised 13 PhD dissertations and 23 MAs and currently supervises 4 PhD and 2 MA students. Completed PhD supervisions: Kelsey Speakman (Communication and Culture, 2024), "Mediating Meat: Buying and Selling Beef in Canadian Supermarkets." Brian McCormack (Humanities, 2018), "Among Umwelten: Meaning-Making in Critical Posthumanism." Neil Balan (Humanities, 2015). “Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower and the Collateralization of Military Violence.” Steven Logan (Communication and Culture, 2015). “Modernist Urbanism in the Era of Automobility: Producing Space in the Suburbs of Toronto and Prague.” Sabine Lebel (Communication and Culture, 2014). “Life Cycle of a Personal Computer: Studies in the Materialities of Risk.” Kelly Bronson (Communication and Culture, 2013). “Framing the Debate: How Scientism in the Language of the Law binds Public-Biotechnology Engagement.” Robinder Kaur Sehdev (Communication and Culture, 2008), “Liliwanna at the Brink: Visual Culture and Colonial History at Niagara Falls.” Naomi Fraser (Communication and Culture, 2007). "We Are All Connected: Internationalism and Canadian Identity." Sarah Ravi Sharma (Communication and Culture, 2006). "Temporality and Difference from the Agora to the Airport: Towards a Theory of Power- Chronography." Melissa West (Communication and Culture, 2006). "Marketing Madonna: Commodity and Corporation." Jenny Burman (Social and Political Thought, 2000). "Global Flows: Economies of Nostalgia and Yearning." Cheryl Simon (Humanities, Concordia University, 1998). "Gender, Genre and Globalization: Discourses of Femininity in the Popular Culture of the 1990s." Adrian Ivachiw (Faculty of Environmental Studies, 1997). "Places of Power: Sacred Sites, Gaia's Pilgrims and the Politics of Landscape."
Current PhD students: Sean Steele (Humanities) Improvising the sacred: Music festivals and spiritual experience; Ferg Maxwell (Communciation and culture) , Forest fires, nature tourism and the algorithms of social media; Ryan Forster (Social and Political Thought) Theorizing politics in the Anthropocene: Marxist and new materialisms; Mauricio Callao Quvedo (Social and Political Thought), Anthropocene and extraction in geological contexts. Postdoctoral Supervision: Trudi Smith, 2011-2013. “Critical and creative visual inquiry grounded in contemporary acts of photography in Canadian National Parks.”
Courses taught include: Animals in Human Cultures, Interdisciplinary Perspectives; Culture and Modernity; Culture and Technology; Encountering the Other; Communication Theory; Interfaces: Humans and Machines; Images of Animals; Reading the Anthropocene
Degrees
PhD in Social and Political Thought, York UniversityMA, "Special Arrangements" (Interdisciplinary Studies), Simon Fraser University
BA in English and Sociology, Simon Fraser University
Appointments
Faculty of Graduate StudiesProfessional Leadership
Communications Officer, York University Faculty Association
Co-Founder, YUFA Climate Emergency Committee (YCEC); Co-Chair, YCEC Curriculum Committee
Member of Editorial Board, IASPM (International Association for the Study of Music) Journal
Senior Faculty Associate, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies
Editor Emerita, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Community Contributions
Convenor and web manager, TAB: Take Academia Back. https://www.facebook.com/groups/622766154521199
Steering Committee member, Politics of Evidence Working Group. https://politicsofevidence.wordpress.com
Member and contributor, Friends of a New Park, community group behind Wychwood Artspace.
Member, SCAN! Seniors for Climate Action Now!
Research Interests
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
An interdisciplinary collaborative study of animals in digital media in the context of environmental risk with 10 co-investigators and collaborators.
Project Type: FundedRole: Principal Investigator
Start Date:
- Month: Jul Year: 2015
End Date:
- Month: Jun Year: 2019
Funders:
SSHRC
-
Summary:
A study of the use and impact of animals in new media sites.
Description:In completion at Goldsmiths, University of London. https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=10293
Published as Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures. Leonardo Books, MIT Press, 2019.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/virtual-menageries
Project Type: FundedStart Date:
- Month: Jul Year: 2012
End Date:
- Month: Jun Year: 2015
-
Summary:
Editor, Editor Emeritus
Description:Editor, 1998-2015, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal in cultural studies.
Project Type: Funded-
Summary:
Annual publication of Canada Watch, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, 2014
Description:A publication dedicated to an examination of the politics of evidence and the status of science under the Canadian Conservative Government.
Project Type: FundedRole: Editor, Author
All Publications
Jody Berland, "Havoc Ornithologies." Ch. 24, Edinburgh Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Helen Goth and Julian Murphet, 2023
“Cat and Mouse: Iconographies of Nature and Desire.” Human Animal Studies, ed. Susan McHugh and Garry Marvin. London: Routledge (in press). Reprint.
“The Work of the Beaver.” Material Cultures in Canada. Ed.Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair. Waterloo: Wilfrid University Press 2015.
Contradicting Media: Toward a Political Phenomenology of Listening.” The Sound Studies Reader. Ed. Jonathan Sterne. London: Routledge, Reprint.
“Cat and Mouse: Iconographies of Nature and Desire. Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Ed.), Cultural Studies and the Environment, Revisited. London: Routledge
'Writing on the Border.' Between Empires: A Canadian Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Gail Faurchou, Sourayan Mookerjea and Imre Szeman. Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
'Postmusics.' Sonic Synergies. Ed. Gerry Bloustein. London: Palgrave, 2008. 35-45.
'Space at the Margins: Colonial Spatiality and Critical Theory after Innis.' Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art. Ed. John O’Brian and Peter White. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. 89-92.
'The Musicking Machine.' Residual Media. Ed. Charles Acland. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 303-328.
“Radio Space and Industrial Time: The Case of Music Formats.” Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Ed. Simon Frith. London: Routledge, 2003, 230-239. Reprint.
“Bodies of Theory, Bodies of Pain: Some Silences.” Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000. Eds. Hilary Robinson, Blackwell Press, 2001, 75-84.
”Nationalism and the Modernist Legacy: Dialogues with Innis.” Capital Culture. Eds. Berland and S. Hornstein. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.
“Cultural Technologies and the 'Evolution' of Technological Cultures.” The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. Eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss. London: Routledge, 2000, 235-258.
“Das Wetter und wir. Wie Nature und Kultur sich miteinander vershranken,” in Widerspenstige Kulturen: Cultural Studies als Herausforderung. Eds. Karl H. Norning and Rainer Winter. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999 (translated), 543-566
“Weathering the North: Climate, Colonialism and the Mediated Body.” Pop Can: Popular Culture in Canada. Eds. L. Van Luven and P. Walton, Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1999, 207-218.
Berland, Jody. Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures. MIT Press / Leonardo Books
Cultures of Militarization, Ed. Jody Berland and Blake Fitzpatrick. TOPIA/Cape Breton University Press, 2010.
Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art. Ed. Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000.
Theory Rules: Art and Theory/Theory as Art. Ed.Jody Berland, Will Straw and David Tomas. YYZ Books; University of Toronto Press, 1996.
North of Empire: Culture, Space, Technology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Received the 2009 Gertrude J Robinson Book Prize by the Canadian Communication Association.
Berland, Jody. McLuhan and Posthumanism: Extending the Techno-Animal Embrace. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2019v44n4a3725
Berland, Jody “McLuhan and Posthumanism: Extending the Techno-Animal Embrace.” Canadian Journal of Communications, Fall 2019.
“Assembling the Virtual Menagerie,” Antennae: Journal of Nature and Culture #30, December 2014, 54-71. www.antennae.org.uk
“The Politics of Evidence: The Contemporary Canadian Context.” MediaTropes eJournal, 5.2. Ed. Jenny Bosaller. University of Missouri, 2015.
'Animal and/as Medium: Symbolic Work in Communicative Regimes.' Global South 3.1 (Spring 2009): 42-65.
"The Elephant in the Classroom." International Journal of Inclusive Education 13:7 (2009): 799-811.
"The Politics of the Exasperated: Arts and Culture in Canada." ESC: English Studies in Canada 33.2 (2009): 24-30.
'Cat and Mouse: Iconographies of Nature and Desire.' Cultural Studies 22.2 (Spring 2008): 431-454.
Walkerton: The Memory of Matter.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (Fall 2005): 93-108.
“After the Fact: Spatial Narratives in the Canadian Imaginary,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory Politics 57 (2005): 39-55.
“Nationalism and the Modernist Legacy: Dialogues with Innis” Culture and Policy 8.3 (1997): 9-37.
On Reading `the Weather. Cultural Studies 8.1 (January 1994): 99-114.
“Writing on the Border.” CR: The New Centennial Review 1.2 (2001): 139-170.
