Writing & Editing – Jessica Dauterive

Current Research

Imagining Acadiana: Cajun Identity in Modern Louisiana
This dissertation tells the history of how a modern Cajun identity developed in 20th century Louisiana. I argue that upwardly mobile Cajun community leaders renegotiated their own collective identity by engaging directly with mass culture and modernity. This identity is rooted in two competing perceptions. First, since at least the late the 19th century, outsiders perceived Cajuns as an isolated and ignorant group, due to their largely lower-class status and Franco-Catholic Acadian ethnicity. Second, beginning in the 1920s, Cajuns began to be seen as whiter and their Acadian ethnicity more refined which resulted in increased economic, social, and political power. This tension between a mythical and whiter Acadian identity and a historical and more ethnic Cajun identity would come to define the region of Southwest Louisiana that became known as Acadiana. This project disrupts assumptions that Cajun traditions survived solely through cultural tenacity and isolation, as well as narratives that position modernity as only a harbinger of cultural degradation, by blurring the line between tradition and modernity itself.

The term Acadiana itself captures this paradox: it linguistically weaved the memory of the Acadian past into Louisiana’s modern cultural and economic landscape but was popularized by a local television company to describe its modern Cajun viewership. By examining key moments in the development of the region’s cultural identity from the 1920s-1970s, this dissertation shows how Acadiana emerged through the creation of regional Cajun culture industries that responded to new social, political, and technological forms. The work of these local community leaders makes clear that Acadiana’s traditional cultures did not survive in spite of modernity, but by engaging with the opportunities it presented for power, preservation, and profit.

Please reach out to me at jessicadoeshistory [at] gmail [dot] com for a copy of this dissertation.

Essays and other Writing

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Cajun History,” Now & Here, August 2026.

“Produce, Prepare, Propel: Reflections from the ACE Mellon Program’s Digital Humanities Team,” Parks Stewardship Forum special issue, Now and Here: Public Humanities and National Parks in Tumultuous Times, co-author with Michael Faist and Cait Johnson, January 2025.

Stories & Tours for online publication New Orleans Historical:

Scholarly Publications

“Save What You Can: Tending Katrina’s Community Archive,” Southern Cultures: Katrina’s American special issue, August 2025.

“Hearing the Americas: Understanding the Early Recording Industry with Digital Tools,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era special issue: New Approaches to Music and Sound, Co-author with Matthew Karush and Michael O’Malley, December 2023.

Reviews

Benjamin Barson, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (2024). Journal of American History, Volume 113, Issue 1, June 2026, 187-188.

I also published a selection of digital humanities tool reviews for the online resource World History Commons including:

Editing

I am co-editor of the upcoming Ethics & AI Series for the National Council on Public History’s History@Work blog. Forthcoming Fall 2026.

I am Managing Editor of New Orleans Historical, an online storytelling project that shares multimedia, place-based histories with the public.

Once upon a time, I served as Editor-at-Large for the online publication Digital Humanities Now, which compiles weekly round-ups of DH materials from across the web.