Catherine Evans

Ph.D. Student

Area of Study

PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies

Bio

Catherine A. Evans is a PhD Candidate in the Literary and Cultural Studies program at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research investigates queer feminist life and activism in 20th and 21st-century American literature, media, and culture.

Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Feminist Media Histories, Radical History Review, The Abusable Past, Rejoinder, and Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. Her public humanities work includes contributions to the public history website “Kipp Dawson: The Struggle is the Victory” (2023) and curating the exhibition “Wearing the Movement: T-Shirts from the Collection of Activist Kipp Dawson” at Chatham University (2025). From 2022 to 2023, she processed the Kipp Dawson Papers (AIS.2022.10) for the University of Pittsburgh Archives and Special Collections.

Catherine’s dissertation project, “The Provocative Lesbian: Queer Media of the Long Seventies,” received the National Women’s Studies Association’s Lesbian Caucus Award. Her dissertation research has received numerous fellowships and grants, including the Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant from Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowship from Smith College Special Collections, and the Northeast Modern Languages Association Summer Research Fellowship, among others. In 2025, she was awarded the Department of English Graduate Student Teaching Award in recognition of her innovative pedagogy, as well as the Schaffer Dissertation Fellowship, which is supporting her research on political t-shirts.

Education

• Honors BA in English with a Writing Concentration, Corporate Communications, and World Literatures from Duquesne University
• MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University

Research

20th and 21st Century American Literature, Cultural Studies, Critical Media Studies, American Studies, Print Histories, Activist Cultures, Archival Studies, and Queer Theory

Publications

Peer-Reviewed

• “Threadbare Politics: The Affective Lives of Feminist T-Shirts.” Feminist Media Histories. Forthcoming, Volume 12, Issue 3, 2026.
• [With Jessie Ramey] “Scrapbooking Dissent: Appalachian and Salvadoran Feminist Labor Solidarity.” Rejoinder. Issue 10, April 25, 2025.
• [With Jessie Ramey] “‘We Came Together and We Fought’: Kipp Dawson and Resistance To State Violence in U.S. Social Movements Since the 1950s.” Radical History Review. Issue 148, January 2024. 181-192.
• “Embodied Selves/Disembodied Subjects: Homing the Body in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. Volume 6, Issue 2, September 12, 2022.

Public and Digital Scholarship

• “Challenging and Documenting State Violence: A Conversation with Activist Kipp Dawson” The Abusable Past, February 12, 2024.
• Kipp Dawson: The Struggle is the Victory. kippdawson.com. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, June 2023