Dr. Désirée Rochat, PhD

Dr. Désirée Rochat is a historian of knowledge and a long-time community educator and memory worker. Her areas of interest include activism, knowledge work, Black community formation, the Black Atlantic, community and activist archives, and oral history. She holds a PhD in Educational Studies from McGill University.

Her transdisciplinary approach bridges historical research, community archiving and popular pedagogy. Her  research centres on the activism of Black Canadian, African American, and Black Caribbean communities in Quebec during the 20^th century, focusing on knowledge practices and intellectual history. Her most recent project looks at the emergence of the street dance scene in the context of Black cultural activism in Montreal in the 1970s. Dr. Rochat also works to preserve community and activist archives. Her project “Black lives in/and archives” fosters an archival ecosystem dedicated to preserving and activating the archives of Black Montreal through collaborative activities. Her publicly engaged pedagogy re-activates histories contained in Black archives, to make both more accessible. With historians Sean Mills and Eric Fillion she co-edited Statesman of the Piano: Jazz, Race, and History in the Life of Lou Hooper (McGill-Queen's University Press-MQUP).

Dr. Rochat is part of the Montreal History Group, the Groupe Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Archivistique, the Black Symposium Noir Collective and the Black Memory Collective.

Winter 2026
HIST 498/670 G Reading the Archives of Black Women’s Lives in Quebec

HIST 398/Z - Movements of the Black Atlantic 

Maugile-Flavien, A., & Rochat, D. (2024). These Halls of Ours: Mapping Black Student Presence at Concordia and Situating Concordia in Black Montreal Youth History. In M. K. Gagnon and B. Webb, (Eds.), Concordia at Fifty: A Compendium for a Community (249-260). Concordia University Library Press.

Rochat, D. (2024). Bâtir des écosystèmes archivistiques (ou: ce que l’archivistique et le travail communautaire peuvent apprendre l’un de l’autre). In Retours et Détours autour de la Diffusion, Proceedings of the 9^th Symposium of the Groupe Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Archivistique.

Mills, S., Fillion, E., & Rochat, D. (Eds.). (2023). Statesman of the Piano: Jazz, Race, and History in the Life of Lou Hooper. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP.

Rochat, D. (2022). La Maison d’Haïti: Haitian Stories of Resistance and Black Diasporic Activism in Montréal, 1972-1986. Social History/Histoire Sociale, 55(14), 325-344.

Rochat, D. (2022). Connecting generations of diasporic activism through community archiving. In C. Maguire, and A. Holt (Eds), Arts and Culture in Global Development Practices: Expression, Identity and Empowerment (118-130). Routledge Publishers.

Choudry, A., & Rochat. D. (2021). Reading lineages of migration and resistance through Montreal’s community archives. In J. Tormey, J., and G. Whiteley (Eds), Arts, politics and the pamphleteer (303-317). Bloomsbury.

Rochat, D., Young, K., Villefranche, M. & Choudry, A. (2020). Maison d’Haïti’s collaborative archive project: archiving a community of records. In Bastian, J., and Flinn, A. (Eds), Community Archives, Volume 2:  Sustaining Memory (113-128), Facet Publishing.

Mills, A., Rochat, D., & High, S. (2020). Telling Stories from Montreal’s Negro Community Center Fonds: The Archives as Community-Engaged Classroom. Archivaria, 90 (Spring), 34-67.

Hampton, R. & Rochat, D. (2019). To commit and to lead: Black women organizing across communities in Montreal. In T. Kitossa, P. Howard and E. Lawson (Eds). Re/Visioning African Canadian Leadership: Perspectives on continuity, transition and transformation (149-169), University of Toronto Press.

Collectif MapCollab (2018). Mon quartier, notre vie: Regards Transatlantiques. Montréal, Qc : Éditions Del Busso.

Choudry, A. & Rochat, D. (2015). Doctoral Studies: What has radical adult education got to do with it? In Heaney, T. and Ramdeholl, D. (Eds.), Special issue of New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education, 147, Reimaging Doctoral Education as a Practice of Adult Education, 35-45.

Selected media coverage

Archives and things [Podcast], interview by Melissa Nelson, September 15 2023

“Our Montreal” [TV], CBC Television, interview by Sonila Karnick, March 5 2022

Selected Presentations

Retracer les racines communautaires des études noires/Black Studies à Montréal : pour une pédagogie engagée et un corpus informaonnel ancré. Colloquium Décentrer le Champs des études noires, Nov. 7-8 2024, Université de Montréal.

Curating stories of Blackness in Montreal: on Black women’s community-anchored knowledge work (1970s-1980s). Keynote presentation, Annual General Assembly Centre for Oral History and Digital Story Telling, Sept. 13, 2024, Concordia University.

Behind the scenes with Betty Riley. Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network, March 9, 2023, Heritage Talk Series.

Mouvements, espaces et transmission: histoires afro-montréalaises de danse. Conférence publique, Jack of All Trades Street Dance Festival, 2024, August, 28. Place des Arts, Montréal.