Katherine Fapp

Biography

Dr. Katherine Fapp joined the University of Missouri in the fall of 2025, and holds a joint appointment as an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Kinder Institute, Honors College, and History Department, where, among other things, she 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 twentieth 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 the histories of women and US politics, US and the world, the transnational and transimperial, knowledge creation, and twentieth-century culture. Interested as well in the intersection of history and popular culture, Dr. Fapp 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 completed her graduate studies at the University of Oxford, 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.