Dr. Kate Drabinski is Teaching Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, Associate Director of the Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL+) program, a co-curricular program and Living-Learning community sponsored by GWST, and Director of UMBC’s Humanities Scholars Program. She received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric with a graduate certificate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. She has taught a wide range of introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies at several universities. During her four-year tenure at Tulane University, Kate presided over a curriculum revision process that resulted in tremendous enrollment growth in the Gender and Sexuality Studies department.

At UMBC she teaches Introduction to Transgender Studies, Introduction to Critical Sexuality Studies, Studies in Feminist Activism, Unruly Bodies, and Sexuality and Queer Theory.

Dr. Kate is the point person for the Critical Sexuality Studies minor that she helped develop in 2011-2012. She serves on advisory boards for the Public Humanities minor, and the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture. She is co-chair, with Dr. Michelle Scott, of the Women’s Faculty Network.

Kate’s research interests include transgender studies, critical pedagogy, public history, and theories of activism. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Radical Teacher and the Baltimore Heritage LGBT History Committee. She writes a popular bicycling blog that deals with local history, politics, and culture and regularly hosts walking tours about Baltimore. She has written extensively for local and web-based publications. Her latest publication is the edited volume Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City, co-edited with Dr. Nicole King and Dr. Joshua Clarke Davis (Rutgers UP, 2019).