Catherine Koehler is Visiting Associate Teaching Professor of Writing Studies in the Department of Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies. She has taught general education, first-year writing, writing in the disciplines, and professional writing courses at UC Merced since 2012, first as a Continuing Lecturer in the Merritt Writing Program. Currently, she is Executive Director of the Degree Completion Program in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, which builds on longstanding service commitments to college access and equity for historically excluded students, particularly currently and formerly incarcerated students.
As an anthropologist, Catherine is interested in the ways routine and mundane acts of writing shape and are shaped by social relations, particularly within institutions/bureaucracies. This informs her teaching practice, which invites students to apply an anthropological sensibility to the study and activity of writing—to approach writing as a sociocultural practice and reveal its constructed nature. Recent publications highlight teaching projects that critically engage first-year students with 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”).
She is a first-generation college student and holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University, where she also trained at the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis.
