Vita
Cat Dawson works at the intersection of the history of art and gender and sexuality studies and pursues research across three major areas: the role of art in the reification and disruption of cultural hegemonies; the relationship between ‘unruly’ bodies in the neoliberal and anthropogenic present; and the elaboration of trans studies as an interdisciplinary field. Their first book, Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists is Shaping the Memorial Landscape, studies the shifting role of monuments in the US 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.
They hold a B.A. from Smith College, a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, an M.B.A. from IE Business School, and have won fellowships and awards including a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and the MIT Press Diverse Voices grant. Beyond the academy they have published cultural criticism in Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Cultured, the Brooklyn Rail, and Momus, and are a proud trustee of Sidwell Friends School (Washington, DC) and Project for Empty Space (Newark, NJ & New York, NY).
ICI Project 2025-26
Trans Form (solicited by The MIT Press) asks what it means to look trans and see in a trans way. Across four monographic chapters on artists working in a variety of media from 1969 to the present day, the book studies how artists make and unmake gender, and describes how trans representational strategies complicate binaries related to gender, representation, and academic and artistic disciplines.
Trans Form intersects with and intervenes into queries currently being pursued in a broader range of disciplines, including investigations in feminist science and technology studies into how recognition that happens at the scale of the human body translates to other scales, such as the painterly surface and the non-human world, and in social and political theory regarding how transparencies and opacities arise in the process of scaling.