Writer, Professor, Scholar of Pop Culture
- Literature, Visual Media, and Music
- Gender, Sexuality, and Race
- The Beatles, Disney, Twilight, and Mermaids
- Melodrama, Fairy Tales, and the Romance
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About
Katie Kapurch specializes in the study of popular culture, including literature, visual media, and music. As a scholar of the Beatles, Disney, Twilight, mermaids, and other major phenomena, she focuses on pop culture icons, offering fresh insights into their appeal, especially when it comes to gender, sexuality, and race.
As Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, she teaches courses on youth culture, fairy tales and myth, and British literature. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Communication Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies.
Katie’s forthcoming books include Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Being (Penn State University Press, 2023), which is supported by an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Katie is also the co-editor of The Beatles and Humour: Mockers, Funny Papers, and other Play (Bloomsbury 2023), the first academic collection to focus on the band’s humor.
Katie is currently working on a book about the Disneyfication of pop music, as well as a book about the mermaid as cultural icon.
Previous books include Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century: Jane Eye, Twilight, and the Mode of Excess in Popular Girl Culture, New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today (co-edited with Kenneth Womack), and other scholarly and public-facing writing linked on this website.
Katie Kapurch 