About

The Frontier Files is an online archive of visual and material culture relating to geographic borders in North America and elsewhere. This site documents the Border Bookmobile Project (2010-2013) which served as the beginning of ongoing research into the relationship between contemporary borders and the western, historical concept of the frontier.  Images and documents chart the shifting aesthetics and politics of borders over the last century.

Lee Rodney is an interdisciplinary writer/curator interested in mobile spaces, transnational identities and alternative economies. She writes on contemporary art, cultural theory and visual culture.  The author of Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America’s Frontier Imagination, her essays are  published in a wide range of books and journals. Various parts of the Border Bookmobile project were developed by Mike Marcon, whose research was essential to building the various archives and texts.  Thanks also to Aaron Moran, Riaz Mehmood and Lydia Burggraff who assisted in our field trips to Detroit and environs. Funding for this research has come from the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.