Catherine M. Roach is a Distinguished Research Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies in New College. She has over twenty-five years of research and teaching experience on gender and sexuality studies in American popular culture. A two-time Fulbright Award winner, she has held visiting fellowships and delivered invited lectures at universities in Australia, Canada, Scotland, England, and Greece.

Her first two books were Mother/Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics (Indiana Univ. Press, 2003) and Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture (Berg, 2007).  Her next academic book, Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture (Indiana Univ. Press, 2016), won Silver Medal in the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards and earned mention in the New York Times Book Review.  As part of that book’s study of the “Find Your One True Love” narrative, Roach undertook a companion project of writing two historical romance novels as Catherine LaRoche (Simon & Schuster, 2012, 2014).

She then published a general-audience book of public scholarship, Good Sex: Transforming America through the New Gender and Sexual Revolution (Indiana University Press, 2022).  Read the companion essay, “Making Good Sex: The Story of the Book.”

Her current book manuscript is under contract at the University of Arkansas Press with the title Actually, a Goddess: The Greek Slave, America’s Most Famous—and Forgotten—Sculpture.  The book project brings together art history with studies of gender, race, and sexuality in the story of America’s most-viewed 19^th century sculpture, The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers (a statue which UA holds in two reproductions).  Accompanying this project, Dr. Roach is Principal Investigator on a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to create a theatrical work about Edmonia Lewis, another important 19th-century American sculptor.

At the University of Alabama, Dr. Roach has won the school’s top research and teaching awards: the Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award (2016) and the Southeastern Conference (SEC) UA Faculty Achievement Award (2021), including UA nomination as SEC Professor of the Year.  She has been a Fellow in the UA Collaborative Arts Research Initiative and continues to bring research alive through the arts for a public audience.

She enjoys hiking, paddling, cooking, and spending time with family and friends— especially summers escaping the Alabama heat back in her native Canada.

Teaching Interests

• NEW 140  Sexuality and Society (every term, large enrollment Core lecture course)
• NEW 415  Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture (Core writing seminar)