Writer, Professor, Scholar of Pop Culture
- Icons in Literature, Visual Media, and Pop 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 icons and the iconic, especially popular phenomena at the intersections of literature, visual media, and music. These include the Beatles, Disney, Twilight, mermaids, and other major cultural touchstones.
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–and Sang Back to Them Ever After (Penn State University Press, 2023). Co-authored with Jon Marc Smith, the book 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, the first monograph to theorize the appeal of melodrama in girl culture. Katie is also co-editor of New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today (with Kenneth Womack), and other scholarly and public-facing writing linked on this website.
Katie Kapurch 