Rachel Fabian
Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies
Rachel Fabian is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies. She is a graduate of the doctoral program in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also received her M.A. in 2013. Her areas of research and teaching specialization include feminist film and media history, transnational media activism, and documentary studies. Her dissertation examines unaccounted for interrelations among independent and activist film and video collectives that proliferated in the US, UK, India, Latin America, and elsewhere during the 1970s–80s from a transnational feminist perspective. It moves beyond studying collectives in terms of the political imaginaries of discrete social movements, drawing attention to moments in which collectives forged “social sites” that mobilized a wide array of transnational relationalities.
More About Me
Fabian’s research has been funded by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Graduate Division of the University of California, Santa Barbara. During Fall 2017, she was a scholar in residence at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, where she contributed to the competitively selected interdisciplinary research project “Rethinking Transnational Feminisms.” She is the former Managing Editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies and also served as the issue editor of the Media Fields Journal special issue “Access/Trespass.” Her recent article “Reconsidering the Work of Claire Johnston” (Feminist Media Histories, Summer 2018) examines British cinefeminist Claire Johnston’s theoretical contributions in light of her lesser known activism and filmmaking during the 1970s.