Dolita Cathcart, PHD

Professor Cathcart comes to CFSI from Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, where she was an Associate Professor of History, the coordinator for the African, African American Diaspora Studies program, coordinator of Semester in the City, and more. Dolita was hired by Wheaton as an adjunct in her second year of graduate school in 1996 and stayed. Prior to her work at Wheaton College, Dolita ran graduate admissions at Lesley College, directed admissions for Harvard University’s School of Public Health, and was the general manager for two restaurants as well. 

Dolita was Wheaton’s first Posse Foundation mentor, and when her students graduated in 2004, she finally completed and successfully defended her dissertation in history from Boston College. Her teaching and research interests focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American women’s political and social history. She has written on the civil rights movement and immigrant women in the United States. Her research has been published in The Historical Journal of Massachusetts, History: Review of New Books, and The Journal of Southern History. Professor Cathcart has appeared as an on-camera scholar for the National Geographic series Origins: The Journey of Humankind and the PBS documentary Birth of a Movement.