Katherine Massoth is an Assistant Professor of History. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Iowa and two Bachelor of Arts degrees in History and Social Science-Secondary Education from the University of California at Irvine. Her interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to research and teaching embraces several themes: gender roles, foodways, domesticity, cultural and ethnic identities, transborder networks, and gendered and raced social structures and legal systems. She previously held an appointment at the University of Louisville and was affiliated with Latin American and Latino Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She also currently holds roles as the newsletter editor and graduate mentor committee mentor for the Coalition for Western Women’s History (CWWH) as well as editorial board member of the Journal of Arizona History.
She is a historian of North America, particularly the Southwest, the West, and U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, from the Spanish Colonial Era through the nineteenth century. Her specialties include Women's and Gender History of the United States and Mexico, Southwestern History, Cultural History, and Social History. As a historian of the Americas, she teaches history courses on women and gender, borderlands, the American West, and chicanx/latinx studies. She also incorporates her background in digital humanities and oral history into her teaching and community engagement.
Her current research focuses on the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, specifically the role of women in performing ethnic identity, transborder trade systems, foodways, and cultural networks. Her book manuscript, Keeping House: The Borders of Gender Roles, Cultural Practices, and Domesticity in Territorial Arizona and New Mexico is under an advanced contract with the David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History from the University of North Carolina Press. She has a forthcoming article, “Engendering the Long Nineteenth Century and Mapping Gender on Arizona History” to be published in the fall 2020 Journal of Arizona History, Special Issue: What's Arizona Got to Do with It? Arizona History in Western, US and Transnational Contexts, edited by Katherine Morrissey.