Biography

Katherine Fapp joined the University of Missouri in the fall of 2025, and coordinates and teaches in the Kinder Honors sequence on Revolutions and Constitutions. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2024, focused on American woman suffragists’ activism in the Pacific World at the turn of the 20th century. Illustrating a new side of the transnational women’s suffrage movement and uncovering the development of feminist networks across that ocean prior to the First World War, it explored suffragists’ use of transnational networks and knowledge creation in their fight for political equality for women globally amidst a world of empires. More broadly, her research interests lie in U.S. women’s political history, the history of the U.S. and world, transnational and transimperial histories, and 20th-century cultural history. 

Interested in the intersection of history and popular culture, Dr. Fapp also produces and hosts the podcast Flashback: American Historians on Movies. Each episode she is joined by another historian to discuss a movie related to their field of expertise, how it portrays history, and what we can learn about our relationship to the past from America’s most popular history maker – Hollywood.

Originally from Tucson, Dr. Fapp completed her BA in history, summa cum laude, at the University of Arizona in 2018. She moved to the University of Oxford for her graduate studies, where she earned her MSt (Pembroke, 2019) and DPhil (St Peter’s, 2024), and taught for a year as a departmental lecturer in the Faculty of History and fellow of the Rothermere American Institute.