Katelyn Campbell

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.

In her current book project -- Another Womyn’s Land: Metronormativity, Inheritance, and the Futures of Ecological Feminisms -- she draws from extensive archival research and fieldwork conducted while at UVA to examine the ways rural queer feminist projects challenge settler land governance in the United States by facilitating practices rooted in queer reconnection with the more-than-human world. The project takes the little-studied archive of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx participants in the womyn’s land movement as its lens for understanding how feminists in rural places produce radical ecological politics that are rendered invisible by metronormativity while also offering a usable past for present day queer scholarship and activism that is increasingly interested in land amidst the growing threats of climate change.

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. Along with Lydia Ferguson, she is the co-president of WGS South -- the oldest organization dedicated to the study of women, gender, and sexuality in North America.

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

Campbell, Katelyn M. “Out on Rural Lands: Country Queer Dis/Orientation and the Potentialities of Loneliness.” QED: A Journal of Queer World-Making (2024). https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.11.3.0035 

 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.