Muriel Gold Senior Visiting Professorship

The Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF) invites applications for the position of Visiting Professor. These positions are open to professors who wish to spend one or two academic terms in a university environment in order to carry out research on gender, sexuality or feminist studies. The Institute offers work space and support, an ongoing seminar program, contact with other professors within McGill and in neighbouring universities - all this located at the centre of a stimulating, bilingual, urban environment.

Catherine M. Roach
Muriel Gold Visiting Professor, Fall 2021
The University of Alabama

Catherine M. Roach is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies in New College, an innovative liberal arts program at The University of Alabama (USA). She has twenty-five years of research experience on gender and sexuality studies in American popular culture. With a PhD from Harvard (1998) and a two-time Fulbright Award winner (the UK and Greece), she is the author of Mother/Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics (Indiana Univ. Press, 2003) and Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture (Berg, 2007), along with two historical romance novels published as Catherine LaRoche (Simon & Schuster, 2012, 2014). Her last 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. Most recently, she’s published invited chapters on “Erotica” and “Sex and Sexuality” in Routledge Research Companions (2017, 2020) and is completing Good Sex, a general-audience trade book on America’s new gender and sexual revolution. At The University of Alabama, she has won the school’s top research and teaching awards and is a Fellow in the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative, working to bring research alive through the arts for a broad public audience. Every semester, she teaches a popular cross-university course, “Sexuality and Society,” that addresses cultural change and campus sexual wellbeing.

While at IGSF, Catherine Roach will be finishing the final section of her current book manuscript, entitled Good Sex: How the New Gender and Sexual Revolution Is Changing America—For the Better. The book is under contract with Indiana University Press through their general-audience trade arm of Red Lightning Books for publication in later 2022. Good Sex tells the story of how, in 21^st century America, we live in a promising era of transformational shift around gender and sexuality. With same-sex marriage legalized, #MeToo everywhere in the news, transgender stories risen to celebrity and civil rights status, and universities nationwide teaching body positivity and consent-based sexual health, this accessible book frames and explains these changes as a cultural turning point toward equity, inclusion, and sexual justice. Prof. Roach writes as a feminist public scholar and cultural observer for a mainstream audience curious about changing norms of gender and sexuality. She looks forward to finishing the book in Canada, to enrich it with comparative perspective in the context of IGSF’s intersectional feminist commitment to social justice education and outreach.