Catherine Fosl

Assistant Professor
Department of Women's and Gender Studies

Women's & Gender Studies
University of Louisville
Gardiner Hall 331
502-852-8160; fax: 502-852-4421

cfosl@louisville.edu

Education	Emory University, PhD, History, 2000
Most recent publications	Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (New York: Palgrave/ St. Martin’s, 2002). "‘Bridges Burned to a Privileged Past’: Anne Braden and the Southern Freedom Move,” Chapter 12 in Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities, edited by Bruce Clayton and John Salmond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). "‘There Was No Middle Ground’: Anne Braden and the Southern Social Justice Movement," National Women’s Studies Association Journal ( Fall 1999): 24-48. "Anne Braden and the 'Protective Custody' of White Southern Womanhood," in Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era, ed. Gail S. Murray (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004).
Current and recent courses	Women in American Culture (introductory WGST course) Modern American Women (cross-listed with History) Southern Women Black & White (cross-listed with Pan-African Studies) Gender and Social Action (graduate seminar cross-listed with Social Work) Women’s Personal Narratives ( graduate seminar cross-listed with English, Humanities) Communication and Gender (cross-listed with Communication) For Communication: Persuasive Movements For Humanities: Modern American Culture America in the 1950s Humanities Perspectives on Sex Roles (cross-listed with WGST)
Research interests	I have served for several years on the Advisory Board of the Civil Rights Oral History Project of the Kentucky Oral Hisory Commission, a project that has interviewed about 100 activists across Kentucky for their memories of the end of legal segregation. I am working on a book that examines the civil rights movement in Kentucky from 1954-1968, consisting of an edited collection of that project's oral histories as well as historiographical essays that place the interviews in context. I am also just beginning new research that could broadly be characterized as an intersectional study of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) rights movement in Kentucky: looking at questions of identity and social movement around LGBT rights and how they have emerged in this state in relation to commitments to racial and gender justice and have resulted in successful multi-issue organizing. This research will also have an oral history component. Winner of a Social Science Research Council Fellowship, 2005-2006, to work on this project.
Personal statement	I am an Atlanta native with several generations of roots in Louisville and a longstanding love of this city based on the stories I heard from my grandmother about her growing up here in the early decades of the twentieth century. Those stories are what led me to a love of history and an eventual Ph.D. in that field. I was born "Catherine Foster," but when I married I combined my last name with my partner's (Foster + Wasel) to become "Catherine Fosl." My partner, Peter Fosl, and two sons, Isasc, 18, and Eli, 11, and I moved to Louisville in 2001 and live in the Highlands neighborhood.