Kate Birkbeck
Biography
Kate Birkbeck is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Watson School for International & Public Affairs. Her research looks at the international arms trade, the local armed groups across the U.S. empire, and the federal ordnance policy which connected the two, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
She holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Cambridge and University College London. Her writing has appeared in Diplomatic History, Time’s Made by History series, and her research has been supported by an emerging scholars award from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Research
Her research examines how states organise violence through non-state actors. Her interests include historical arms trade, federal and local governance, and the political economy of policing.
Her first book project, Public Arms, Private Armies, traces how the federal government distributed arms through the militia system between the Civil War and the First World War. Through case studies in Louisiana, Idaho, and Hawai‘i, it shows how federal militia funding armed groups that enforced racialized violence, consolidated settler rule, and foreclosed political pluralism. Bringing together technology studies, carceral studies, and the political economy of war, the project argues that federal arms supply was a crucial mechanism through which the United States delegated coercive power to private actors.
Alongside revisions to the book, she is beginning a second project on the Pinkertons, tracing the agency from nineteenth-century strikebreaking to its contemporary role in the surveillance of Amazon warehouses and universities. She has also published on the British history of the National Rifle Association.
She welcomes enquiries from researchers with shared interests.
Publications
“Defend his own hearth”: The Transatlantic Origins of the National Rifle Association (Diplomatic History, 2026).