Biography

Gabrielle Moser is an art historian, writer, and independent curator. She is the author of Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (Penn State University Press, 2019) and she is at work on her second book, Citizen Subjects: Photography and Sovereignty in Post-War Canada (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press). She is currently pursuing two collaborative research projects that examine the intersections of artistic practice and political subjectivity. The first, "Photography and Biopolitics," undertaken with student researchers Jeffrey Newberry, Charles Marco Diokno Manzo and Myrtle Sodhi, investigates how artists and youth navigate their experiences of (self-) surveillance, and how they resist its effects through glitches, hacks, and other creative forms of speaking back to state power. The second, “Feminist Transmissions” (alongside Giulia Damiani and Helena Reckitt), examines the ongoing resonance of 1970s feminist practices on the present, with a particular attention to the uses of art, psychoanalysis and writing in Italian feminism.

Moser is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her writing appears in venues including Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, Prefix Photo and Third Text. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, the Ryerson Image Centre, the University of British Columbia, and the British Library, and she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017. She is a founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, a feminist working group based in Toronto since 2016, and Assistant Professor of Aesthetics and Art Education in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Faculty & School/Dept

• Faculty of Education -

Courses Taught

• Learning from Traumatic Histories: Curation and Controversies (GS/EDUC 5045)
• Research and Issues in Language, Culture and Teaching (GS/EDUC 5100)
• Un-learning the Archive: Facts, Fictions and Missing Histories (GS/EDUC 5235)

Selected Publications

• Gabrielle Moser (2023). Affidamento as Curatorial Methodology: Feminist Approaches to Pedagogy and Curating in the Work of EMILIA-AMALIA Journal of Curatorial Studies, 12 (2), 258 - 288. doi:https://doi.org/10.1386/jcs_00095_1.
• Adrienne Huard and Gabrielle Moser (2022). Special issue: Reparation and Visual Culture (Adrienne Huard and Gabrielle Moser, Eds.) Journal of Visual Culture, 21 (1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221093638.
• Gabrielle Moser (2022). When photographs fail, when monuments fall: Photography and Reparations in Canada (Lee Mackinnon, Ed.) Photography and Culture.
• Gabrielle Moser (2022). Race, Climate Change and the Photographic Negative in Richard Mosse's Heat Maps Third Text.
• Gabrielle Moser (2021). Settler colonialism's container technologies: photographing crates in the Canadian Arctic (1926-1953) Settler Colonial Studies. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2021.1884427.
• Gabrielle Moser (2020). Familial ties and citizen claims: photography and early civil rights activism in African-Canadian newspapers Visual Studies. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2020.1827973.
• Gabrielle Moser (2019). Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire. Penn State University Press
• Gabrielle Moser (2019). Viola Desmond photograph -- now on $10 bill -- reminds us that her brave battle against prejudice went undepicted Toronto Star.
• Gabrielle Moser (2018). "No Looking After the Internet: Curatorial experiments and pedagogical failures in engaging difficult images" photographies, 11 (2-3), 313-327. doi:10.1080/17540763.2018.1445016.
• Gabrielle Moser (2017). "Photographing Imperial Citizenship" Journal of Visual Culture, 16 (2), 190-224. doi:10.1177/1470412917710826.
• Gabrielle Moser and Helena Reckitt (2016). "Feminist Tactics of Citation, Annotation, and Translation: Curatorial Reflections on the Now You Can Go programme" On.Curating (29).

Research Projects

*Photography and Biopolitics: Race, Visibility and Embodiment in 21st Century Image Culture

Reparative Frames: Visual Culture after Reconciliation

Failure is an Option: Assessing challenges and identifying resources for feminist artist-run culture

Picturing Race and Citizenship: photography and belonging in Canada

Family Camera

York University Affiliations/Cross Appointments

• Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies: Faculty Associate
• Digital Justice Research Cluster: Faculty Associate
• CYPIRN (Children and Young People Interdisciplinary Research Network): Co-Lead
• Centre for Feminist Research