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 in the Department of English at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. I completed my PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003, where I worked with scholars including 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 teachers including 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 film on Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees living 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 over the years. I worked for several summers with the Jerusalem International Film Festival, have served as a juror for film festivals, directed the Victoria International Jewish Film Festival from 2017–19 after previously serving as its programmer, and have continued to jury films for the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. I remain, unapologetically, a devoted film hobbyist in addition to being a scholar of cinema.

By disposition I am probably more bookish than cosmopolitan, but by study and good fortune I became a polyglot of sorts. I read and speak French, Hebrew, and Spanish with varying degrees of fluency, and I have spent formative periods living in both France and Israel. Although Canada is home, I still retain deep personal and intellectual ties to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for many years in Oakland and Berkeley.

Over the years I have participated in a variety of publishing, editorial, and public intellectual projects. I served for several years as a section editor for the open-access academic journal Postcolonial Text. Earlier in life I was involved in student journalism and theory publishing, and in 2000 I helped found the online commentary project Jewish Peace News, which I co-edited with other activists and scholars for more than a decade. Before graduate school — and briefly during it — I also held legal proofreading jobs that gave me a lasting appreciation for precision, tedium, and the occasionally surreal culture of large law firms.

More recently, a significant portion of my institutional and public work has concerned questions of Jewish belonging, pluralism, antisemitism, and dialogue within university life. At UVic, I chair the Working Group to Address Antisemitism, housed at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, and I have spearheaded efforts to develop broader spaces for Jewish academic and cultural engagement on campus such as the Jewish Academic Hub. I care deeply about maintaining intellectually serious, politically pluralistic environments in which disagreement can coexist with mutual recognition and institutional responsibility.

Although I am not conventionally religious, Jewish tradition, history, and communal life remain important orienting structures in my life. Over the years I have participated in a range of Jewish communal and political organizations, from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and Berkeley Hillel to the historic Congregation Emanu-El in Victoria, where I served for seven years on the board, including four years as vice president. In the mid-1990s, I was among the early organizers involved in what later became Jewish Voice for Peace, long before the organization developed its present-day political orientation and national prominence.

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, Evelyn 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 committee work and university administration alike.

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