More About Hannah

Born in 1984 in the unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin territory currently known as Ottawa, Hannah McGregor was raised by folk musicians who early on instilled in her a belief that art-making is for everyone and a commitment to building local community. After attending Canterbury High School’s literary arts program, loafing around in bookstores for a few years and trying to be a novelist, and then completing a Bachelor of Humanities at Carleton University (with a short stint abroad at the University of Edinburgh), they departed Ottawa for good. They completed a Masters of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, publishing their first ever article from their final research project on Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, before going on to complete a PhD at the University of Guelph’s TransCanada Institute. Her dissertation, “Complicit Witnessing: Distant Suffering in Contemporary White Canadian Women's Writing” (2013), examined twenty-first-century literature by white Canadian women that represents, or bears witness to, the lives of “distant others,” arguing that these texts model a fraught “ethics of complicity” that both reinforces and complicates narratives of Canada as a benevolent middle power. This project planted the seeds for her conviction that actually Canada is fake.

After this, Hannah pivoted toward digital humanities and periodical studies, completing a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta with the Editing Modernism in Canada project. Her project, “Modern Magazines Project Canada,” was a collaborative initiative that took up the call to read magazines as a form of new media technology that, alongside radio and film, helped to shape the emergent consumer-publics of the twentieth century. In collaboration with the University of Alberta Libraries and the Manitoba Legislative Library, Hannah helped to facilitate the digitization of the full run of the Winnipeg-based magazine The Western Home Monthly (1899-1932). Their research took advantage of this digitization to explore new methods for the study of periodicals, leading to multiple articles, book chapters, and special issues on the topic. With Paul Hjartarson and Faye Hammill, they also secured a SSHRC Connection grant for “Magazines and/as Media: Methodological Challenges in Periodical Studies,” a workshop that included international scholars, librarians and digitization specialists, and local magazine writers and editors in discussions of the intersections of periodical publishing and digital culture. The papers from this workshop were published in joint special issues of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and English Studies in Canada.

During her time at the University of Alberta, Hannah also started making the podcast Witch, Please with her friend and collaborator Marcelle Kosman; this fortnightly discussion of the Harry Potter series was Hannah’s first foray into using podcasting as a form of publicly engaged scholarship, a research area that became central to her work once she was hired as an Assistant Professor in Simon Fraser University’s Publishing Program. Their first major project as a faculty member was “Scholarly Podcasting in Canada,” a SSHRC Insight Development grant she co-directed with Siobhan McMenemy, Senior Editor at Wilfrid Laurier University Press. The goal of this project was to develop methods for podcasts to be circulated as forms of publicly engaged scholarship in their own right, rather than being understood exclusively as knowledge mobilization. To this end, Hannah created the podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, an exploration of the insidious, nefarious, insurgent, and mundane ways we enact our feminism in our daily lives. Secret Feminist Agenda was not only successfully put through three seasons of publicly accessible peer review, but also garnered considerable attention as a ground-breaking model of sound-based scholarship.

The success of Secret Feminist Agenda led to Hannah being invited to join the SpokenWeb Partnership Grant as a co-applicant and head of the Podcast Task Force, where they helped to develop The SpokenWeb Podcast, a collaborative podcast that explores the possibilities of audio-based scholarship for engaging with audio archives. At this point people seemed pretty into the whole scholarly podcasting thing, so Hannah and Siobhan applied for a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant to create the Amplify Podcast Network, a collaborative with Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Wilfrid Laurier University Library, SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, and the DOXA Documentary Film Festival. The goal of the project is to build the infrastructure for the production, peer review, promotion, and long-term preservation of scholarly podcasts.

In 2020 Hannah and Marcelle decided to reboot Witch, Please through a new partnership with the feminist podcast network Not Sorry. In 2023 Hannah and Marcelle, alongside supervising producer Hannah Rehak, aka Coach, went indie with Witch, Please Productions: feminist media for a radically inclusive world. After concluding the reboot of Witch, Please, the Witch, Please Productions team developed a new flagship podcast: Material Girls, a scholarly podcast about pop culture. Now that they can afford to pay producers, Hannah has more time to dedicate to their first love, writing. Their first book, A Sentimental Education (WLUP 2022), is a collection of essays that combine personal anecdotes with scholarship to explore the process of collective feminist meaning-making. Publishers Weekly described it as “a stirring collection of essays exploring sentimentality and the use of emotion in reading and storytelling” that “draws on the works of feminist thinkers including Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Jia Tolentino, and … will surely take its place among them.” Next up they’re co-authoring a book on podcasting and peer review for Bloomsbury’s Podcast Studies series, and writing about Jurassic Park as a feminist classic for ECW Press’s Pop Classics Series.

Now an Associate Professor at SFU and the incoming Director of the program, Hannah teaches courses that explore the intersections between publishing and social change, with a focus on helping students to understand how cultural industries are structured, and how these structures impact the kinds of stories that can be told. When she isn’t making podcasts, writing books, or redesigning her courses yet again, Hannah hangs out with her two cats, Pancakes and Al Purrdy; she likes listening to podcasts, embroidering, cooking elaborate vegan meals, playing the ukulele, reading queer sci fi and fantasy, playing tabletop RPGs, and also listening to podcasts where other people are playing tabletop RPGs.

Download Hannah’s CV here.

“Book review: Sentimentality in a spirited, fiercely feminist package.” Vancouver Sun August 19 2022.

“VanPodFest cohost Hannah McGregor talks social justice, nerding out, and the hyper-niche.” Stir November 15 2021 ().

“Extending scholarship to oral traditions through podcasting.” Maclean’s November 5 2021.

“Knowledge Mobilizers: SFU scholarly podcasters are redefining peer-reviewed work.” SFU News April 8 2021.

“A Canadian academic podcast network is reimagining the sound of scholarship.” University Affairs February 4 2021.

“Witch, Please podcast rides Harry Potter's robe tails into broader discussions.” The Vancouver Sun December 11 2020.

“Top-rated podcasters pull back curtain on their work for Vancouver festival.” The Vancouver Sun November 13 2020.

“Secret Feminist Agenda – a treasured item in my ‘feminist killjoy survival kit,’” by Yves Rees. The Conversation 18 August 2020.

“Want facts with that? New podcast network dedicated to peer-reviewed academic work.” CBC News 12 July 2020.

“Setting the CanLit canon on fire.” University Affairs 6 March 2020.

“Powerful, diverse writers strike a literary reckoning in Refuse: CanLit in Ruins,” by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew. Quill & Quire October 22 2018.

“Podcasting goes to school,” by Natalie Samson. University Affairs November 1 2017.

“Witch, Please: Edmonton feminist Harry Potter podcast enchants listeners.” Edmonton Metro May 25 2016.

“Marcelle Kosman & Hannah McGregor: The Lady Scholars of Witch, Please.” Ravishly March 2016.

“Harry Potter podcast by Edmonton 'lady scholars' reaches listeners around world,” Edmonton Journal October 16 2015.