Fonds P0207 - Lorna Roth fonds

Dr. Lorna Roth graduated from Sir George Williams University with a B.A. in Sociology (with Distinction) in 1972 and with a Diploma in Communications in 1974. She pursued her studies at McGill University and got a M.A. in Communications in 1983. Meanwhile, she had joined Concordia University in 1979 as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies. She became assistant professor in 1994 and completed her PhD. in Communications the same year at Concordia. She served as Graduate Program Director of M.A. in Media Studies from 2001 to 2002, and Chairperson of Department of Communication Studies from 2002 to 2005. She became Professor in 2013.

Lorna Roth is the author of numerous articles and book chapters related to minority communications and cultural rights, especially on Aboriginal media development in Canada. In 2005, she published Something New in the Air: The Story of First Peoples’ Television Broadcasting in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press) which was the first broad and integrated overview of the history of First Peoples television broadcasting, up to and including the creation of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) in 1999.

Lorna Roth was active in the Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies (ACUNS) as Concordia Council member of its Northern Studies Committee (member since 1993 and Chair between 1994 and 2015). From 2007 to 2013, she was a member of the Montreal Life Stories Project team at Concordia, run out of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, which produced oral histories of 500 Montrealers who emigrated to escape from mass violence and conflicts in their home countries. She has been a Fellow in the School of Community and Public Affairs since 1993 and in the Simone de Beauvoir Institute since 2007.

In 2003, in recognition of her work as a groundbreaking educator, she was awarded the YMCA’s Woman of Distinction Award in the education category. In 2013, she was inaugurated into the Provost’s Circle of Distinction.

Lorna Roth is presently working on an e-manuscript called Skinvisible: Race, Colour Technologies and “Intelligent Design,” which explores the ways in which skin colour is imagined, embedded, and colour-adjusted over time in products and visual technologies that have a sense of flesh as central to their design. Her focus is on what happens when manufacturers recognize that not all skin is “light/white.” A range of essays from this manuscript have already been internationally circulated and are considered foundational to opening up a new trajectory in cultural and visual studies.

On May 1, 2019, the Concordia University Senate, conferred on Dr. Roth the designation of “Distinguished Professor Emerita,” in the Department of Communication Studies in recognition of her “outstanding contributions to the field, department, faculty, and university.”