WEARING THE MOVEMENT
WEARING THE MOVEMENT
In 2025, Catherine co-curated “Wearing the Movement,” at Chatham University’s The Susan Bergman Gurrentz '56 Art Gallery. Working alongside historian Jessie B. Ramey and designer Megan Urban, Catherine curated a unique look into feminist activist Kipp Dawson’s 250+ t-shirt collection. The exhibition ran from October 15 to December 12, and built from Catherine’s work processing the Kipp M. Dawson papers for the University of Pittsburgh Libraries Archives and Special Collections. “Wearing the Movement” urged attendees to consider the politics of everyday fabric, asking: What does it mean to wear, and live, your politics?
Public Writing
“A Coup at Carnegie Mellon?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 12, 2025. [With Sheila Liming].
“Challenging and Documenting State Violence: A Conversation with Activist Kipp Dawson” The Absuable Past, February 12, 2024. [With Jessie B. Ramey]
“Wearing the Movement: Reflections” Pittsburgh Review of Books, November 12, 2025 [With Jessie B. Ramey & Megan Urban]
Digital Scholarship
Wearing the Movement: Kipp Dawson’s Digital T-Shirt Archive. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, October 2025.
Wearing the Movement" features over 200 political t-shirts from the extensive collection of Kipp Dawson (1945- ), an activist, coal miner, and educator who organized on the frontlines of nearly every major freedom struggle since the 1950s. Catherine processed each and every shirt and the University of Pittsburgh Archives and Special Collection's team digitized them. The website is hosted by Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and tied to the larger Kipp Dawson project site, Kipp Dawson: The Struggle is the Victory.
Kipp Dawson: The Struggle is the Victory. Core contributor. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, June 2023.
This public history site offers a multimedia, open educational resource authored by scholars and archivists at Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, Emory University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Tennessee Knoxville, and West Virginia University. The collaboration brings together a group of researchers, librarians, and technologists across generations, institutions, and disciplinary backgrounds. The goal is to provide access to Kipp Dawson’s story through her own words, writing, photographs, documents, and movement ephemera as well as historical context and analysis. Using an intersectional, feminist lens to view the remarkable breadth and depth of Dawson’s coalitional activism, we suggest a re-thinking of leadership within social movements. Catherine digitized many of the archival objects featured on the site and worked directly with Dawson to organize her papers, which are now housed at the University of Pittsburgh Archives and Special Collections as the Kipp M. Dawson papers.