Media and the Moving Image

Rachel Afi Quinn is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. Her transnational feminist cultural studies scholarship focuses on mixed race, gender and sexuality, social media and visual culture in the African Diaspora. Her first book, "Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo" was published in 2021 by University of Illinois Press. She was part of a filmmaking team that produced the 2015 documentary "Cimarrón Spirit" about contemporary Afro-Dominican identities, and her related essay “‘No tienes que entenderlo, solo respetalo’: Xiomara Fortuna, Racism, Feminism and Other Forces in the Dominican Republic” was published in The Black Scholar. Her essay, “Spinning the Zoetrope: Visualizing the Mixed-Race Body of Dominican Actress Zoe Saldaña” was published in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. She has also written about queerness in the Dominican Republic for Small Axe and on African photography for Burlington Contemporary. She was a recipient of the 2018 Ross M. Lence Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and a 2018-19 Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She was also a co-founder of the social justice feminist collective South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU) and a co-creator of the UH Critical Disability Studies Initiative.