Un/Potted Bio

I am an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, where my research and teaching move across cultural and media studies, global cinema, Jewish studies, postcolonial studies, and modernist literature. Much of my recent work concerns documentary film, collaboration across lines of political conflict, public memory, and the ethical and aesthetic problems of representation. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in film, literature, critical theory, and writing, and I supervise MA and PhD students working in a range of interdisciplinary fields.

My intellectual life has long been shaped by a somewhat unruly combination of literary criticism, political argument, cinephilia, Jewish ethical traditions, and public-facing institutional work. I continue to believe that scholarship matters most when it remains connected to wider human questions — historical memory, justice, collective life, artistic form, and the difficult work of sustaining dialogue across difference. Walter Benjamin's suggestion that each generation possesses "a weak messianic power" to redeem unrealized possibilities from the past still strikes me as a source of cautious but practical optimism.

I joined the University of Victoria in 2006 after three years as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama. I completed my PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003, where I worked with Chana Kronfeld, Michael Lucey, and Daniel Boyarin. My dissertation examined the work of Aharon Appelfeld and Édouard Glissant — two writers whose very different engagements with memory, exile, history, and language continue to influence my thinking.

Cinema has remained central to my intellectual and personal life since my undergraduate years at Brown University, where I studied semiotics, film theory, and visual culture with Mary Ann Doane, Leslie Thornton, and Michael Silverman. After graduation, while living in New York City, I adapted my undergraduate honours thesis into a feature-length experimental documentary on Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees in the United States. The project, titled And I Still Remain Here, explored the difficulties of narrating traumatic historical experience and was screened in a handful of galleries and small theatres before fading, perhaps appropriately, into relative obscurity.

My enthusiasm for cinema has also taken more communal forms. I worked for several summers with the Jerusalem International Film Festival, have directed and programmed the Victoria International Jewish Film Festival, served as a regional programmer for the Victoria Film Festival, and continue to jury films for the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. I remain, unapologetically, a devoted film hobbyist in addition to being a scholar of cinema.

A significant and growing part of my institutional and public work concerns questions of Jewish belonging, pluralism, antisemitism, and dialogue within university life. At UVic, I chair the Working Group to Address Antisemitism and spearheaded the creation of the Jewish Academic Hub at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society — an institutional home for research, programming, and pluralistic engagement with questions affecting Jewish students, faculty, and staff. Jewish tradition, history, and communal life are important orienting structures in my own life. Over the years I have participated in a range of Jewish educational, religious, and civic organizations, including Congregation Emanu-El in Victoria, where I served for seven years on the Board of Directors, four of them as vice president. In the mid-1990s I was among the early organizers of what later became Jewish Voice for Peace, and co-edited the organization's Jewish Peace News bulletin with other activists and scholars for several years; I have had no leadership role in the organization for more than two decades, and my own views remain grounded in a commitment to the national and human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.

I value family life and friendship enormously as counterweights to the abstractions and professional distortions of academic culture. I am happily married to Caren Zilber-Shlensky and am the proud father of two remarkable children, who continue to remind me that imagination, humour, and moral seriousness are not mutually exclusive categories. I remain very close to my extended family, including my activist mother, Evely Laser Shlensky. My father, Ron Shlensky, ז״ל, passed away unexpectedly in 2006 and is still profoundly missed.

From time to time I also write creatively. Thanks in part to my teenage acting experience at Santa Barbara High School, I have spent many years inventing improbable theatrical universes, shady minor characters, and meandering bedtime narratives for my children — an activity that has turned out to be surprisingly good preparation for university committee work and teaching alike.

Conversations, disagreements, recommendations, and unexpected correspondences are always welcome; please feel free to contact me.