Catherine Jacquet
Associate Professor
History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Affiliate Professor, African and African American Studies
223B Himes Hall
225-578-4498
Courses Taught
US History Since 1865
History of Sexuality
US Women's History
Introduction to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Black Feminist Theory and Activism
LGBTQ Activism and Social Movements
Graduate Seminar: Readings in Twentieth Century US History
Gender, Violence, and Resistance (interdisciplinary course examining sexual violence in the US)
Current Research Interests
My research is rooted in my interests in social movement activism and how people make change. My first book, The Injustices of Rape (UNC Press, 2019), examined antirape activism in the US, 1950-1980.
My current project examines prison rape in the age of mass incarceration.
I am also launching an oral history project, tentatively titled "Studying Sexual Violence," which will be a series of interviews with trailblazing scholars who researched the histories, causes, manifestations, incidence, and/or impacts of sexual harm in the decades before #MeToo. This includes scholars who studied rape in prisons. These pioneering scholars insisted that their research on gender-based violence was “real” scholarship and they demanded recognition of their work as valid. They generated studies and scholarship now considered foundational to our current understandings of sexual harms.
Interested in Directing Theses On
US social movements and activism
Women’s history
Sexual and gender-based violence
LGBTQ history
Education
PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2012
MA, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004
BA, University of Connecticut, 2000
Book
The Injustices of Rape: How Activists Responded to Sexual Violence, 1950-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
Notable Publications
“Fighting Back, Claiming Power: Feminist Rhetoric and Resistance to Rape in the 1970s,” Radical History Review 126 (October 2016).
“Queer History Goes Digital: Using Outhistory.org in the Classroom,” in Leila Rupp and Susan Freeman, eds. Understanding and Teaching U.S. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
“The Giles-Johnson Case and the Changing Politics of Sexual Violence in the 1960s United States,” Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 3 (Fall 2013).
Public History Projects
Guest Curator, “Confronting Violence, Improving Women’s Lives.” Exhibition with the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. Sept 2015-Aug 2016. Online exhibition Confronting Violence, Improving Women's Lives
Project assistant, Outhistory.org. Website redesign and content management. 2011-2012.