Education
A.B. American Studies, Wellesley College (2017)

M.A. American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020)

Ph.D. American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2023)

 Biography

Katelyn M. Campbell (she/her) is Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Program Advisor to the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. Her research focuses on the relationship between land, feminisms, and rurality in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

 Womyn’s land remains one of the most contested sites of seventies feminisms. Often (rightfully) remembered for its biological essentialisms and white settler practices and aesthetics, the movement has long circulated as an improper object for queer-feminist thought, serving as what Elizabeth Freeman described as a ‘temporal drag’ tying queer theory to an essentialist past that it would rather forget. And yet, in a moment where queer-feminist thought is increasingly turning toward the ecological as well as seeking strategies for community-building in an age of authoritarianism, the extensive documentary practices of womyn’s land communities render their archive a vital site that might offer a usable, if flawed, past from which to build. In her manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled In the Archive of Womyn’s Land: Property, Sovereignty, and the Future(s) of Feminist World-Making, Campbell enters the space of the ‘drag’ within the movement’s conflict-riddled archive to read it alongside Black and Indigenous feminist thought, examining the ways women of color mobilized womyn’s land as a strategy for asserting sovereignty and building solidarity within and against conceptions of land-as-property.

 Dr. Campbell earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023, where her work was supported by the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective, the Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life, and the Margaret Storrs Grierson Fellowship from Smith College Special Collections. She is the 2016 Harry S. Truman Scholar from West Virginia and an alumna of Wellesley College, where she began her teaching career as a Sexual Health Educator. Prior to arriving at UVA, she was a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar and Teagle Fellow in the Department of Integrative Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University.

 Selected Publications

Campbell, Katelyn M. “Inheriting Womyn’s Land: ‘Thinking-With’ Feminist Pedagogies in a Messy Archive.” Feminist Theory Special Issue on Intergenerational Feminisms (2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001251327974

 (In Press and Forthcoming 2025) Campbell, Katelyn M. “Out on Rural Lands: Country Queer Dis/Orientation and the Potentialities of Loneliness.” QED: A Journal of Queer World-Making.

 Campbell, Katelyn M. “The Women Activists Found Little Peace at Bucolic School”: Utopian Dreams, Radical Feminist Explosions, and the Pedagogical Potential of Sagaris,” in Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present edited by Victoria Wolcott. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2024.

 Campbell, Katelyn M., Lauryn DuPree, and Lucía Mock Muñoz de Luna. “Dear Toni Morrison: On Black Girls as Makers of Theories and Worlds,” in Black Schoolgirls in Space: Stories of Black Girlhoods Gathered on Educational Terrain edited by Esther Ohito and Lucía Mock Muñoz de Luna. New York: Bergahn Books (2024): pp. 50-77.