Rate My Professor Phillip Lobo

Dr. Phillip Lobo serves as Assistant Teaching Professor of English and English Department Head at The Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities at Ball State University, a position he has held since joining the faculty in the fall of 2019. He earned a B.A. in English magna cum laude with high thesis honors from Tufts University in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California in January 2019, where his dissertation, Alternative Realisms: Subjectivity-Production in Novels and Games, examined formal realism as a technology of modern subjectivity across novels, games, and probability discourses from the 18th century to the present. Prior to Ball State, Lobo held teaching positions at USC, including instructor of record for Writing Composition and Rhetoric (2010–2011) and teaching assistantships in English, Comparative Literature, and East Asian Languages and Cultures departments (2011–2018), covering courses such as Women Writers of Europe and America, Introduction to Comparative Literature, and Introduction to Chinese Art and Literature. At the Indiana Academy, he teaches American Literature, World Literature, Creative Writing, Critical Approaches to Literature, Speculative Fiction, The Short Story, and colloquia, emphasizing student-centered pedagogy where students collaboratively select readings and interpretations, inspired by Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

Lobo's research interests encompass English literature, the history of the English language novel, formal realism, critical literary theory, game studies, subjectivity studies, intermedia comparatist studies, new media studies, and gender and feminist studies. His peer-reviewed publications include “Novel Subjects: Robinson Crusoe & Minecraft and the Production of Sovereign Selfhood” in Game Studies (19:1, 2019), “Replaying History: The Statistical Realism of Alternate History Narratives and Games” in Neprikosnovennyy Zapas (138:3, 2021), “Between Homo and Ludens: The Dichotomy of Subjectivity in The Snail on the Slope” in Russian Literature (2022), “Survive Style 5+ and the Ethics of Creative Advertising” in Postmodern Culture (27:2, 2017), and “0. <an intervention into the critical discourse around Oryx & Crake>” in Chiasma: A Site for Thought (4:4, 2017). He also contributed the book chapter “Modeling Modernity” to Critical Insights: Joseph Conrad (Salem Press, 2016) and authored 38 articles for Open Letters Monthly. Lobo received a College Doctoral Fellowship (2009–2014) at USC and, in 2021, a Bell Grant from the Muncie Community Foundation with Meghan Riley to support collaborative instruction between speculative literature and world literature courses. He has presented at conferences including the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2016) and USC symposia, and holds affiliations with the Modern Language Association and American Comparative Literature Association. His work bridges literary and ludic elements, fostering new expressions of identity and subjectivity.