Dr. Kathleen A. Kennedy

Details

Education

• PhD, University of California, Irvine, 1992
• MS, University of California, Irvine, 1988
• BA, State University of New York at Plattsburgh, 1984

Teaching

• HST 121 Survey of the History of the United States to 1877
• HST 313 American Cultural History
• HST 390 Introduction to Historiography

Research and professional interests

Dr. Kennedy is a historian of gender and American cultural history. Her research focuses on the gendered and racial constructions of violence. It also seeks to answer how and in what ways the cost of that violence influences both American culture broadly defined and the writing of history more specifically. She publishes in early American history and modern popular culture and is currently exploring the relationship between trauma and constructions of fatherhood in slave narratives.

She came to Missouri State University after teaching for fifteen years at Western Washington University. Previous to that she taught at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her operating philosophy is simple: dogs are superior to cats and all other vermin.

Selected publications 

• On Writing the History of So Much Grief: Cotton Mather’s Decennium Luctuosum and the Trauma of Colonial History.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 58:3 (Summer 2017): 219-241.
• “On Writing the History of the Body in Pain,” Cultural History 4:1 (Spring 2015): 87-106.
• “Reading Kathleen Mallory: Trauma and Survival in the Detective Fiction of Carol O’Connell,” in Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, ed by Julie Chappell and Mallory Young (Palgrave, 2017)
• “Imagining the New Military of the 1990’s in Babylon 5’s Future Wars in American Militarism on the Small Screen, ed. Anna Froula and Stacy Takacs. London: Routledge, 2016.
• Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I. Indiana University Press, 1999.

Awards and honors

• Judith Lea Ridge Article Prize, Western Association of Women’s Historians, 1999
• Outstanding Faculty Member Award, Missouri State Fraternity and Sorority Life (student nominated), October 2012