Catherine Fosl

Catherine (“Cate”) Fosl, MSW, PhD, is founding director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Louisville, where she is also a professor of women’s, gender, & sexuality studies. A historian by training, Fosl is the author of three books: the award-winning Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Palgrave, 2002; paperback, University of Kentucky Press, 2006); Freedom on the Border: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky (coauthored with Tracy E. K’Meyer; University of Kentucky Press, 2009), and Women For All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (University of Georgia Press, 1989), as well as numerous articles and reports. Her fields of expertise are oral history, US and Kentucky social history, and post-WWII social movements in the US South.

Fosl has increasingly turned her research interests to community engagement. She is active in the Coordinating Council for Women in History and received their 2005 Catherine Prelinger Award for nontraditional historians. She was also a fellow of the SSRC’s Sexuality Research Fellowship Program in 2005–2006.

Her current and recent research includes an article in a recent special LGBTQ issue of the Public Historian and coeditorship of an anthology on the history of housing segregation laws.