Dr Katherine Fapp
Departmental Lecturer in US History
I am an American transnational historian interested in women's activism and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My research in particular focuses on the development of transnational feminist networks in the Pacific, and the ways in which the women's suffrage movement intersected with a growing American empire and international society in this period.
Research Interests
My research interests include women's political history, the United States and the World, the transnational and transimperial, the Pacific, travel, the history of film, the history of memory, popular culture, and the late nineteenth-to-early twentieth century US.
My doctoral thesis, entitled '"To Clasp Hands...Across the Ocean": American Woman Suffragists in the Pacific World, 1893 - 1928,' explores the political worldmaking of American woman suffragists across transnational and transimperial networks in a Pacific context. Illustrating a new side of the transnational women's suffrage movement and uncovering the development of feminist networks across that ocean prior to the end of the First World War, this research explores suffragists' use of transnational networks and knowledge creation in their fight for political equality for women globally. Focusing on five moments of transnational suffrage work, the thesis moves across the American continent and into the Pacific as it explores the ways in which suffragists wove the idea of the Pacific and other women who lived across it into their campaign for the vote and quest for global sororal unity. Examining the intersection between the movement and the growing American presence in the Pacific, particularly in the cases of Hawai'i, the Philippines, China, and to a lesser extent Australia, it explores the tension between activists' claims of international gender solidarity and the imperial contexts in which they worked, and the ways in which this tension significantly affected this political worldmaking. Analysing this work as statecraft, the thesis argues that it resulted in a unique form of gendered internationalism predicated on the importance of politically-empowered women to the processes of global governance and power.
Besides my doctoral work, I am broadly interested in the history of film and history on film. My earlier research focused on the memory of the American Civil War, especially as understood through popular culture. I continue to pursue this interest through my podcast, "Flashback: American Historians on Movies," where myself and a guest explore history through the lens of America's most popular history maker – Hollywood.
