About Cathy Hannabach
Dr. Cathy Hannabach is a book editor and indexer, podcaster, and writer who helps interdisciplinary scholars turn their vibrant ideas into reality and spark social change.
She is the founder and CEO of Ideas on Fire, an academic editing and indexing agency helping interdisciplinary academics write and publish awesome texts, enliven public conversations, and create more just worlds.
Dr. Hannabach also hosts Imagine Otherwise, the podcast highlighting the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Imagine Otherwise’s programming partners have included the Smithsonian Asian American Pacific Center, Tangle Movement Arts, and the Association for Asian American Studies.
She is the author of Blood Cultures: Medicine, Media, and Militarisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which traces the cultural history of blood as it both enabled twentieth-century US imperialism and was creatively transformed by feminist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and queer artists and activists, and Book Marketing for Academics (Ideas on Fire, 2016), which teaches scholars how to harness their resources, skills, and time to build their author platform and get the word out about their new books.
Her scholarly research appears in journals and books including Cultural Politics, Women and Performance, Succeeding Outside of Academia, Social Text: Periscope, Studies in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Journal of Homosexuality, Time and Society, and Zombies and Sexuality. In addition, her cultural commentary has been featured in media outlets such as the BBC, New Learning Times, Dismantle magazine, Book Jawn, the California Aggie, and Bully Bloggers.
Dr. Hannabach has taught courses in gender and sexuality studies, film studies, and American studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Berkeley.
A former dancer and long-time proponent of community arts, Dr. Hannabach is the former treasurer of the DP Arts Consortium. She is the founder of Philly Queer Media and the Pittsburgh Contemporary Queer Cinema Series, and she has collaborated with artists and curators on projects including the ‘Ae Kai Culture Lab, a multimedia exhibition featuring Indigenous Pacific artists in Hawai’i; Signal Boosting, a podcast miniseries highlighting emerging scholars creating socially engaged and multimedia work; and Phreak ‘n Queer, a queer and trans arts and music festival spotlighting visual, performing, and musical artists in the US Northeast.
Dr. Hannabach earned her PhD in cultural studies from the University of California, Davis and her BA in gender and women’s studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
She lives in New Jersey, where in her spare time you can find her strolling through nature preserves and botanical gardens, cooking up a storm, or nerding out over plants and fungi.
