Caitlin Joy Dobson (she/her) is a PhD candidate at USC Annenberg and certificate holder in the USC Dornsife Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies. As a critical cultural studies researcher and anti-violence scholar activist, through an interdisciplinary lens Dobson’s work broadly focuses on power, violence and trauma to understand the global complexities of gender-based violence. She is focused under the umbrella of sexual violence on the distinct form of power-based harm known as multiple perpetrator rape. She engages cultural studies, intersectionality studies, and transnational feminism to examine the role of culture in instances of MPR. Through an intersectional and transnational lens, her dissertation project embraces a critical media studies and case study approach to understanding how MPR is depicted through media representations. In her dissertation research she examines media representations of the rape of Recy Taylor by multiple white men in 1944 Alabama; the wrongful conviction and incarceration of the now Exonerated Five, formerly known as the Central Park Five since 1989; and the rape and ultimate murder of both medical student Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, and veterinarian Priyanka Reddy in Hyderabad in 2019.

With a professional background in international human rights nonprofit advocacy and public diplomacy, Dobson has also worked within the USC Center for Feminist Research as a doctoral scholar and the Gender & Sexuality Studies department as a teaching assistant. She is co-convener of the Multidisciplinary Intersectional Approaches to the Study of Violence and Trauma Research and Writing Group. She is trained as a violence prevention specialist through Los Angeles feminist nonprofit Peace Over Violence, as an Online Hotline Specialist through the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), and she has volunteered with the USC Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) Department’s peer-to-peer education group known as Violence Outreach Intervention and Community Empowerment (VOICE). Her research has been shared through the International Communication Association conference, the National Communication Association conference, the International Intersectionality conference, the Cultural Studies Association Conference, the Critical Mediations conference, the Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Research and Creative Project Symposium, the USC-UPenn Annenberg Summer Doctoral Institute for Difference in Media & Culture, the National Women's Studies Association conference, and the USC Institute for Intersectionality and Social Transformation. The breadth of her intellectual interests includes trauma-informed pedagogy, critical theories of race and culture, masculinities studies, critical whiteness studies, cultural appropriation, and most importantly, theories of power.