Catherine Koehler is an anthropologist whose research examines how ideas about literacy, language, and education construct social difference and are mobilized by institutions, past and present. This work also shapes her teaching, which emphasizes inclusive writing pedagogy and cultivates students’ anthropological sensibilities, helping them understand writing as a socially situated and constructed practice. Recent publications highlight teaching projects that critically engage first-year students in archival methods in literacy study and local and national archives of prison writing (“Activist Bibliography as Abolitionist Pedagogy in the American Prison Writing Archive”; “Engaging Neglected Histories: First-Year Students, Archives, and Wikipedia”). Her administrative activity and service teaching reflect a sustained commitment to access and equity in higher education, alongside a critical interest in how institutional policies and practices normalize particular assumptions about merit and belonging.
Currently, Koehler is Executive Director of UC Merced’s Degree Completion Program, focusing on academic programming and policy development to support some college/no degree students to return and graduate. She has taught general education and writing courses at UC Merced since 2012, first as a Unit 18 Lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program. She is a first-generation college student and holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University, where she also trained at the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis.
