Catherine Jane Lavender

Catherine J. Lavender is an Associate Professor of History and the Di­rector of the American Studies Program at The College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. She received her PhD in Western History and Women's History from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997.

In addition to a variety of institutional grants, her research has been funded by The Woodrow Wilson Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies, The Fund to Improve Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), The American Philosophical Foundation, and The Mellon Foundation, among others. In 2011, she was named the John J. Marchi Fellow in Public Affairs at the College of Staten Island/CUNY.

She is the author of Scien­tists and Storytellers: Feminists and Anthropologists and the Construction of the American Southwest (University of New Mexico Press, 2006). She has also coedited, with Lillian Schlissel, The Western Women's Reader (HarperCollins, 2000).

Her extended essay on "Picturing the American West" made up part of the NEH-funded Picturing United States History project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center. It may be viewed at http://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/item.php?item_id=216 and http://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/?cat=8.

She is currently writing a biography of the Apache leader Silas John Edwards (1887-1977), who invented the written form of the Western Apache language in 1904, created a new religion in the 1920s, spent nearly four decades in prison for a crime he did not commit, and was a peaceful fighter for justice throughout much of the twentieth century on behalf of Indian peoples' rights to use their languages and practice their religions.