Kate Birkbeck
Biography
Kate Birkbeck is a Research Associate at the Watson School for International & Public Affairs and a PhD Candidate at Yale University [until August 26th]. She is also an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research looks at the international arms trade, the local white armed groups across the American domestic and overseas empire, and the federal policies which connected the two, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
She holds degrees from Yale University [after August 26th], the University of Cambridge and University College London. Her writing has appeared in 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 concerns the historical arms trade, federal and local governance, and the political economy of policing and empire.
Her first book project traces how white groups across the U.S. got guns between the Civil War and the First World War. Through case studies in Louisiana, Idaho, and Hawai‘i, it reveals how federal militia funding channeled arms to that enforced racialized violence and foreclosed political pluralism. By bringing together gun studies, carceral studies, and the political economy of war, the project offers a new account of how paramilitarism shaped the development of U.S. state violence.
As well as revisions for the book, she is beginning research on her second project. This project follows the Pinkertons from 19th-century strikebreaking to their current role in surveilling Amazon warehouses and universities, situating them within the evolving infrastructure of U.S. militarism. Additionally, she has published on the British history of the National Rifle Association.
She encourages anyone with shared interests to get in touch.