Writer, Professor, and Scholar of Pop Culture

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Katie Kapurch, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English, Texas State University

Co-editor of AMP: American Music Perspectives, Penn State University Press

Ph.D. in Communication Studies, Rhetoric and Language, Women’s and Gender Studies Portfolio, The University of Texas at Austin

Areas of Expertise

Public-Facing Publications

See Public-Facing Articles.

Scholarly Publications (Selection)

For links to full-text, see Academia.edu and ResearchGate sites.

Scholarly Monographs (refereed)

Kapurch, Katie, and Smith, Jon Marc. 2023. Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Being– and Sang Back to Them Ever After. Penn State University Press; supported by an award from the National Endowment from the Humanities.

Kapurch, Katie. 2016. Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century: Jane Eyre, Twilight, and the Mode of Excess in Girl Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Edited Books (refereed)

Kapurch, Katie, Mills, Richard, and Heyman, Matthias, editors. 2023. The Beatles and Humour. Mockers, Funny Papers, and other Play. Bloomsbury.

Kapurch, Katie and Kenneth Womack, eds. 2016. New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Books Under Contract (refereed)

Kapurch, Katie, The Disneyfication of Pop: Disney Plus Beatles, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift. Forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

Kapurch, Katie. The Mermaid as Pop Icon: From Siren Song to Disney and Barbie. Forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

Journal Articles (refereed)

Kapurch, Katie. forthcoming. “Once Upon a Fishtail in Aquamarine, an Ecofeminist Fairy Tale: Mermaids as Water Girls in Girl Culture from 19th Century Fairy Tales to Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989; 2023).” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies.

Kapurch, Katie. 2022. “Unvaulting “Disney Plus Pop” in 2021: Romance, Melodrama, and Remembering in Taylor Swift’s All Too Well, McCartney’s Lyrics, and The Beatles: Get Back.” AMP: American Music Perspectives, 1.2: 159-172. https://doi.org/10.5325/ampamermusipers.1.2.0159

Kapurch, Katie, and Smith, Jon Marc. 2020. “Blackbird Fly: Paul McCartney’s Legend, Billy Preston’s Gospel, and Lead Belly’s Blues.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, 22 no. 1-2: 5-30.

Kapurch, Katie, and Walter Everett. 2020. “‘If You Become Naked’: Sexual Honesty on the Beatles’ White Album.” Rock Music Studies 7, no. 3: 209-225.

Kapurch, Katie, and Smith, Jon Marc. 2019. “A Fear So Real: Film Noir’s Fallen Man in Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and the David Lynch Oeuvre.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 21, no. 1 (2019): 89–108.

Kapurch, Katie. 2016. “Something Else Besides a Daughter?: Postfeminist Girlhood Meets Maternal Melodrama in Tangled and Brave.” The Lion and the Unicorn 40, no. 1: 39-61.

Kapurch, Katie. 2015. “Rapunzel Loves Merida: Melodramatic Expressions of Lesbian Girlhood and Teen Romance in Tangled, Brave, and Femslash.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19, no. 4: 436-453.

Kapurch, Katie. 2012. “‘Why can’t you love me the way I am’: Rhetorical Functions of Fairy Tales in the Representations of Girlhood and Agency in Neo-Victorian Visions of Jane Eyre.” Neo-Victorian Studies 5, no. 1: 89-116.

Kapurch, Katie. 2012. “Unconditionally and Irrevocably: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37, no. 2: 164-187.

Chapters in Books (refereed)

Kapurch, Katie, 2023. Heyman, Matthias, and Mills, Richard. Introduction: Mockers, Funny Papers, and Parading with Ringo: Why the Beatles are Still in Play In The Beatles and Humour: Mockers, Funny Papers, and Other Play. Bloomsbury.

Kapurch, Katie. “The Beatles and the Bard, the Walrus and the Eggman: Playing with William Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll and/as Perspective by Incongruity.” In The Beatles and Humour: Mockers, Funny Papers, and Other Play. Bloomsbury.

Alleyne, Mike, Everett, Walter, and Kapurch, Katie. 2023. “Billy Preston and the Beatles Get Back: Black Music and the Wisdom of Wordplay and Wit.” In In The Beatles and Humour: Mockers, Funny Papers, and Other Play. Bloomsbury.

Everett, Walter, and Kapurch, Katie. 2023. “Come Together: Feeling the Distemper of Murk and Elation with the Beatles (1969) and with Sheila E. and Ringo Starr (2017; 2020).” In Analyzing Recorded Music, edited by William Moylan, Lori Burns, and Mike Alleyne. Routledge.

Kapurch, Katie. 2021. “The Beatles, Gender, and Sexuality.” In Fandom and the Beatles: The Act You’ve Known for All These Years. edited by Kenneth Womack and Kit O’Toole, 139-166. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kapurch, Katie. 2020. “The Beatles, Fashion, and Cultural Iconography.” In The Beatles in Context, edited by Kenneth Womack, 247-259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kapurch, Katie. 2020. “A Girls’ Studies Approach to YA Literature: A Rationale and Method.” In Teaching Young Adult Literature (MLA Options for Teaching Series), edited by Mike Cadden, Karen Coats, and Roberta Seelinger Trites, 91-98. New York: MLA.

Kapurch, Katie and Smith, Jon Marc. 2015. “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Blue: The Make-Do Girl of Disney’s Cinderella (2015).” In Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture, Volume 2, edited by Morgan Genevieve Blue and Mary Celeste Kearney, 67-83. New York: Peter Lang.

Kapurch, Katie. 2017. “The Wretched Life of a Lonely Heart: Sgt. Pepper’s Girls, Fandom, the Wilson Sisters, and Chrissie Hynde.” In The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love, edited by Kenneth Womack and Kathryn B. Cox, 137-160. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Kapurch, Katie and Jon Marc Smith. 2016. “Blackbird Singing: Paul McCartney’s Romance of Racial Harmony and Post-racial America.” In New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today, edited by Kenneth Womack and Katie Kapurch, 51-74. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kapurch, Katie. 2016. “Crying, Waiting, Hoping: The Beatles, Girl Culture, and the Melodramatic Mode.” In New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles: Things We Said Today, edited by Kenneth Womack and Katie Kapurch, 199-220. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kapurch, Katie. 2013. “Teen Girls and Popular Culture: The Twilight Saga as Exemplar.” In Girls’ Literacy Experiences In and Out of School: Learning and Composing Gendered Identities, edited by Elaine J. O’Quinn, 107-122. New York: Routledge.

Kapurch, Katie. 2012. “‘I’d Never Given Much Thought to How I Would Die’: Uses (and the Decline) of Voiceover in the Twilight Films.” In Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the Twilight Series, edited by Anne Morey, 181-197. New York: (Ashgate) Routledge.

GRANTS, AWARDS, and OTHER DISTINCTIONS (Selection)

Kapurch, Katie. Texas State University Research Enhancement Program. Funded: Jan. 2021 – May 2022. Grant.

Kapurch, Katie. Award for Faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Blackbird Singing: A Cultural History of African Americans’ Musical Conversations with the Beatles. National Endowment for the Humanities. Awarded December 2018. Funded Jan.-Dec. 2020.

Kapurch, Katie. College of Liberal Arts Excellence Award for Scholarship, Texas State University. Feb. 1, 2018.

Kapurch, Katie. Department of English Excellence Award for Scholarship, Texas State University. 2015; 2017.

Kapurch, Katie. Recipient (Principal). Texas State University Research Enhancement Program. Funded: Jan. 2017 – May 2018). Grant.