Campus Collaborators

Dr. Sadie Counts currently serves as the Curator of Cultural Collections at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She began working in museums in 2014 at the Great Plains Art Museum while working on her BA in Global Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She holds an MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Tennessee. Her dissertation explores queer and Indigenous forms of critique in museum spaces through the lens of both Repatriation and contemporary art.

Dr. Lisa King is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her work is interdisciplinary, based on cultural rhetorics with an emphasis on contemporary Native American/Indigenous rhetorics and practices of Indigenous self-representation. She is co-editor of Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics (2015) and Decolonial Possibilities: Indigenously-Rooted Practices in Rhetoric and Writing (2025), and author of Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (2017). Her current work focuses on decolonization as part of the rhetorical relationship between public Indigenous self-representation, audiences, and place, spanning museum sites in Europe and the United States as well as local collaboration with the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture.

Cat Shteynberg served as the Assistant Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. With over 17 years of museum experience, including roles at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Hood Museum of Art, she has curated more than 12 exhibitions. She holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MSc in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography from Oxford University. Her research and publications explore museums’ roles in community building, material anthropology, Repatriation, and the social lives of objects.