A documentary filmmaker, scholar, and creative writer, Jodie Childers is interested in 20th-century transnational American studies, Icelandic literature, cultural McCarthyism and Cold War political rhetoric. Her creative work explores the psychic and environmental effects of extractivism and deindustrialization on Rust Belt Appalachia.  

Her film Down by the Riverside, which premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival in the fall of 2023, examines the environmental legacy of American folk musician Pete Seeger. In 2018, she received the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Fellowship to pursue independent research and language study in Reykjavík, Iceland, and her work on the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness and the American influence on his fiction has been published in Comparative American Studies and Resources for American Literary Studies.  

Jodie holds a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in American studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College. Most recently, she was a visiting assistant professor at Tulane University where she taught first-year and expository writing.  

She is currently working on a book project that analyzes the rhetoric of dissent in HUAC testimonies. At UVA, she will be teaching writing courses on the theme of social imagination, and her pedagogical areas of focus include interdisciplinary research, digital composition and engaged learning.