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Department of Arts, Culture and Media

Rachel Lobo

Headshot of Rachel Lobo
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Email
rachel.lobo@utoronto.ca
Building HW 417
Program
Media Studies

Rachel Lobo is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Race and Social Justice at the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media. Before joining UTSC, Rachel was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow with the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her postdoctoral research explores the history of the domestic workers’ movement that unfolded throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Ontario. Drawing primarily from the publication archive of feminist newsletters housed within the RiseUp! Feminist Archive, this work examines the possibilities, tensions and limitations of an archival practice grounded in transnational feminism. Rachel received her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from York University. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation maps the complex portrait of resistance that emerges within the Alvin D. McCurdy fonds, the largest photographic archive of Black history in Canada. Based in the Archives of Ontario, this research used a community-based collection to illuminate networks of resistance against racialized labour systems in Ontario.

Rachel has held teaching positions with the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. Rachel’s teaching, like her research, centres knowledge produced through social movements.

Education

Ph.D., York University

M.A., Toronto Metropolitan University

B.A., University of Toronto

Teaching Interests

Visual culture; critical race studies; social movement history; environmental justice; archival studies; transnational feminism

Research Interests

Visual culture; critical race studies; social movement history; environmental justice; archival studies; transnational feminism

Awards and Grants

SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2024)

Academic Excellence Award, York University (2022)

Michael Baptista Essay Prize, The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, York University (2021)

Communication Project Fund, Canadian Historical Association (2021)

SSHRC, Canadian Graduate Scholarship- Doctoral (2018-2021)

Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2017)

Publications

[Forthcoming] Lobo, R. (2023) “‘This is Montreal, Alabama’: Photography, Protest and the Sir George Williams Affair.” In R. Cummings, C. Abraham & N. Mohabir (Eds.) 1969, Visualities of a Black Protest. Wilfred Laurier University Press.

Book Chapter

Lobo, R. (2022). “Photographic Afterimages: Nationalism, Care Work and Motherhood in Canada.” In Zoraida Lopez-Diago & Lesly Deschler Canossi (Eds.), Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation (pp. 106-122). Leuven University Press.

Book Review

Lobo R. (2022). "Review: Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present" by Robyn Maynard. Undercurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 54–55. https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/40343

Journal Article

Lobo R. (2021). Resisting Erasure: Photographic Archives and Black History in Canada. International Journal of Canadian Studies 7–36. https://doi.org/10.3138/ijcs.58.x.7

Lobo R. (2019). Archive as Prefigurative Space: Our Lives and Black Feminism in Canada. Archivaria 68–86.

Exhibition Review

Lobo R. (2017). Free Black North (review). Archivaria 177–181.