PhD Candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies

Catherine A. Evans is a PhD Candidate in the Literary and Cultural Studies program at Carnegie Mellon University.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Catherine’s research investigates queer feminist life and activism in 20th and 21st-century American literature, media, and culture. Her peer-reviewed publications can be found, or are forthcoming, in venues such as American Literature, Radical History Review, Feminist Media Histories, Rejoinder, and Feminist Encounters. As a feminist researcher and educator, she values public-facing scholarship and is a core contributor to the digital humanities project Kipp Dawson: The Struggle is the Victory and the primary researcher for Wearing the Movement: Kipp Dawson’s Digital T-Shirt Archive.

Her research practice includes collaborating with local activists to process their archival collections and making portions of their collections accessible and engaging. From 2022 to 2023, she processed the Kipp Dawson Papers (AIS.2022.10) for the University of Pittsburgh Archives and Special Collections under the direction of historian Jessie B. Ramey. In 2025, she curated Wearing the Movement, based upon Kipp Dawson’s extensive t-shirt collection, with Ramey for the Chatham University Susan Bergman Gurrentz '56 Art Gallery.

Catherine’s dissertation project, “The Provocative Lesbian: Queer Media of the Long Seventies,” traces lesbian-feminist media production, maintenance, and circulation in working-class American communities from 1968 to 1998. Each of the chapters traces a different lesbian-feminist cultural institution across a unique medium: the anthology, board game, handbook, public access television program, and t-shirt.

At Carnegie Mellon, Catherine teaches courses at the intersection of critical theory, media studies, gender and sexuality studies, writing studies, and American literature. In 2025, she was awarded the Department of English’s Graduate Student Teaching Award, the highest honor in the department for a graduate instructor of record, for her pedagogy.

Beyond her scholarship and teaching, Catherine has written for venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Pittsburgh Review of Books and been interviewed for a variety of podcasts, such as re:verb and Forbes Avenue. She welcomes inquiries regarding her work and is always enthusiastic to speak with students.

Bio

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT

Catherine’s dissertation, “The Provocative Lesbian: Queer Media in the Long Seventies,” examines activist and queer feminist media. Following the cultural studies tradition, it focuses on a range of materials produced from 1968 to 1998, such as print media like anthologies, guidebooks, and manuals, visual media including public access television shows and traveling slide shows, and participatory media like t-shirts and board games. She traces the queer quasi-institutions, literary publishers, and media producers central to living a feminist life. Ultimately, she argues that these overlooked and often discarded moments of media production, maintenance, and circulation illustrate the queer dynamics of the relationship between lesbian identity and feminism. Radical politics become something that can be read, watched, displayed, consumed, or worn.

The project has been highly awarded, receiving the National Women’s Studies Association’s Lesbian Caucus Award, the Modern Languages Association Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship, the Harvard Radcliffe Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant, and Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowship at Smith College.