Tea Lobo
Early-Career Fellow 2021–2022

Dr. Tea Lobo’s (born 1984 in Belgrade, Serbia) research focuses on the philosophy of the city and urban ecology. In light of the rapid urbanisation of the world, she is interested in the ideals and expectations—or «imaginaries»—that shape the production of cities, particularly in their relation to non-human nature. Her research at the Collegium Helveticum is part of her habilitation thesis, in which she will investigate the imaginaries of urban nature around the world. Her research has also focused on aesthetics and cultural studies, and her PhD thesis took a transdisciplinary approach to working in the fields of literature and philosophy. She has put her research on the city into practice while managing a neighbourhood development project in Basel.

Tea studied philosophy and English literature at the University of Basel, Fribourg and Harvard. She was granted a four-year Doc.CH scholarship from the SNF to write her thesis and completed her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Fribourg in 2017. Her PhD thesis focused on the interactions between literature and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy, especially regarding questions of perception and representations of interiority. In 2017, she participated in a postdoctoral programme in Parma and Florence (IT). She was a junior fellow at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg for the 2018 autumn semester, and a Holcim Foundation Fellow in the Philosophy Department at ETH Zurich during the 2020 spring semester.

Tea is a member of the Philosophy of the City research group, as well as the International Society for Architecture and Philosophy. She received the Elisabeth and Werner Leinfellner Award in 2016, and was shortlisted for the British Society of Aesthetics essay prize in 2020. Since 2022, Tea is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Chair for Practical Philosophy at ETH Zurich.