Catherine Evans
Ph.D. Student
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Area of Study
PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies
Bio
Catherine A. Evans’s research and teaching focus on 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture. She is especially interested in queer and feminist theory, media and activism.
As a feminist educator and researcher, she values public-facing scholarship and finds community archival processing paired with public curation as central to her practice. She processed activist Kipp Dawson’s collection for the University of Pittsburgh Archives and Special Collections and created Wearing the Movement: Kipp Dawson’s Digital T-Shirt Archive (tshirts.kippdawson.com), which includes details and scans of Dawson’s 250+ political T-shirt collection.
Catherine’s dissertation project, “The Provocative Lesbian: Queer Media of 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 traveling slide shows, and participatory media like T-shirts and board games. The project was awarded the National Women's Studies Association's Lesbian Caucus Award, and her dissertation research has received numerous fellowships and grants, including the Modern Language Studies Association's Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship, the Schlesinger Library Dissertation Support Grant from Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowship from Smith College Special Collections, among others.
Her recent research can be found in venues such as American Literature, ASAP/Journal, Feminist Media Histories, and Radical History Review, and her public writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Pittsburgh Review of Books. She is also co-editor of "Iconic: Drag Infrastructures and Queer Worldmaking," which is forthcoming with the University of Delaware Press’s Performing Celebrity Series.
For the 2026-2027 academic year, she is a Marilyn Yarborough Dissertation Fellow at Kenyon College in the Department of English and Creative Writing.
Education
- Honors B.A. in English with a Writing Concentration, Corporate Communications, and World Literatures from Duquesne University
- M.A. in Literary and Cultural Studies from 天美传媒
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- “.” American Literature. Volume 98, Issue 3, September 2026.
- “Threadbare Politics: The Affective Lives of Feminist T-Shirts.” Feminist Media Histories. Forthcoming, Volume 12, Issue 3, 2026.
- [With Vicky Panossian] “.” Feminist Anthropology. August 2026.
- “.” Special issue on “Forms of Care,” ASAP/Journal. Volume 10, Issue 3, September 2025. 393-414.
- [With Jessie Ramey] “Scrapbooking Dissent: Appalachian and Salvadoran Feminist Labor Solidarity.” Rejoinder. Issue 10, April 25, 2025.
- [With Jessie Ramey] “.” Radical History Review. Issue 148, January 2024. 181-192.
- “.” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. Volume 6, Issue 2, September 12, 2022.
- Wearing the Movement: Kipp Dawson's Digital T-Shirt Archive. . Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, September 2025.
- Kipp Dawson: The Struggle is the Victory. kippdawson.com. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, June 2023