Cathy is co-founder and co-principal investigator of the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. An advisor to the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition, she is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

Her current research interests include Olaudah Equiano and the controversy over origins, a MacArthur Foundation monograph, and collaborative online publication on "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age" (with David Theo Goldberg), and a study of the culture and neurobiology of "knowing."

Cathy has published numerous books, including Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford, 1986; Expanded Edition 2004), Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Hopkins, 1989), The Book of Love: Writers and Their Love Letters (Pocket/Simon and Schuster, 1992), Thirty-Six Views of Mount Funi: On Finding Myself in Japan (Dutton/Penguin, 1993; New Edition with Afterword, 2006, Duke U Press), and, with Linda Wagner-Martin, The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995) and The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States (1995). In collaboration with photographer Bill Bamberger, her most recent book is Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (Norton, 1998). She is General Editor of the Oxford University Press Early American Women Writers series, past President of the American Studies Association, and past editor of American Literature.