Neue Professur für Transgender Studies ab 1.3.: Cat Dawson

Cat Dawson is an art historian who works at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies. Focusing on the relationship between minoritized subjects and dominant cultures from the long nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, their research explores how artists intervene in normative ways of representing and categorizing bodies. They us the close study of those interventions to describe how categories and cultures have changed over time, and to challenge ontologies that have produced and maintained the marginalization of sexual and racial others.

In their first book, Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists is Shaping the Memorial Landscape (forthcoming from The MIT Press in August 2025), they argue that the role of monuments in the US has shifted significantly over the last century from telegraphing the ideological values of dominant culture to inscribing narratives long excluded from it, and doing so in formal terms that challenge our understanding of what, precisely, a monument is. Across four chapters that study key monumental moments from the proliferation of Confederate monuments after the defeat of Reconstruction to present-day projects by Black and queer artists, the book shows how artists whose practices were maturing during the social upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies, such as Adrian Piper, developed representational strategies subsequently elaborated by contemporary artists, including Kara Walker and Mark Bradford, to fundamentally reshape the US monumental landscape. Monumental will among the first books to examine the historical conditions that have led to, and the aesthetic terms that define, this new generation of monuments.

In addition to Monumental, Dawson has several projects in process. Their second book, Trans Form: Shaping the Subject in Modernity and Contemporaneity (solicited by MIT Press), asks what it means to look trans and see in a trans way, and whether, to what degree, and under what circumstances it makes sense to think the categories of trans and queer together. Reaching from 1862 to the present, during which the modern category trans has been elaborated, the book elucidates the central role that visual art has played in trans subjects’ ability to give form to an identification difficult to articulate and at times illegal to embody. “Queer and Trans Family Photography,” co-authored with the historian Leah DeVun, studies how both queer and trans families, and the conventions around their photographic representation, challenge conventions of family and home not only in relationship to heteronormative forms of familial creation and reproduction, but also those within queer and trans communities. “Painting the Modern Trans Form” is a historiography of the modern understanding of the category trans as told through abstract twentieth- and twenty-first century US American painting that reveals how definitions of transness have always oscillated between the binary and non-binary, and the ontological and epistemological, to argue that the category of trans has long evidenced a multiplicity that fundamentally contravenes the project of its categorization.

After earning a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University at Buffalo, Dawson has served as Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at University Massachusetts, Amherst; Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies and History of Art, University of Pennsylvania; Postdoctoral Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar; Guest Lecturer, Sarah Lawrence College and, most recently, Visiting Assistant Professor jointly appointed between the departments of Art History and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College.