Hi, I’m Cat Ariail, a historian of women’s sport. I study issues of race, gender, citizenship, and nationalism in modern women’s sport in the United States and Caribbean. My dissertation, “Sprints of Citizenship: Black Women Athletes and the Making of Modern Citizenship in the United States and Jamaica, 1948-1964,” examines how the experiences of black American and Jamaican women track stars illuminate the re-thinking of the raced and gendered boundaries of citizenship in both places. I am working with the University of Illinois Press to develop my dissertation into a monograph, Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity.

I also am a lecturer of United States history at Middle Tennessee State University.