Catherine Knight Steele

CTL-E-6351 · Person · scholar · contemporary

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07537 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6351.

Catherine Knight Steele is a scholar of race, gender and media, with a focus on Black culture, discourse and digital communication. She is "an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park where she serves as the Director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab," which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and part of the DISCO Network. She was founding director of Maryland's African American Digital Humanities initiative. Her book Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021) "examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S.," and won the Association of Internet Researchers' Nancy Baym Book Award and the National Communication Association's Diamond Anniversary Book Award. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before Maryland, she served as an assistant professor at Colorado State University. A biographical source also identifies her as a native Chicagoan.

Notes

STAGING: temp id EB-07. Older publisher-era bios (2021) list Assistant Professor; current UMD and author sources consistently say Associate Professor — Associate is used. The 'native Chicagoan' detail and the 2014 doctorate year rest on the single HILT bio in this packet and are Provisional-grade details inside a Verified record. CURATOR'S JUDGMENT (DRAFT): A Chicagoan directing a Mellon-funded Black communication and technology lab — the field record (EB-01) has a working laboratory because of Steele.

Referenced by

• Black Digital Studies — related to → this record
• Digital Black Feminism — authored by → this record

Sources

• UMD AAAS faculty profile (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication and the director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab.'; 'Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 Nancy Baym Award from the Association of Internet Researchers and the 2022 Diamond Anniversary Book Award from the National Communication Association.' (primary source · build store)
• Steele, About (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park where she serves as the Director of the Black Communication and Technology Lab, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and part of the DISCO Network.' (primary source · build store)
• UMD WGSS directory (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Catherine Knight Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland - College Park and was the Founding Director of the Andrew W. Mellon funded African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum).'; 'Dr. Steele earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago.'; 'Her book Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press Fall 2021), examines the relationship between Black women and technology as a centuries-long gendered and racial project in the U.S.' (primary source · build store)
• HILT instructor bio (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Catherine Knight Steele is a native Chicagoan who received her doctorate in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2014. She previously served as an assistant professor at Colorado State University.' (build store)
• MastersInCommunications (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, she taught at Colorado State University.' (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6351 · Combined Graph record U-07537 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 5 sources · 2 mapped relationships.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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