American Studies

Kathleen Burns is Assistant Professor of American Studies in the English Department at Oklahoma State University. Before joining OSU in 2024, she was the Hixon-Riggs Postdoctoral Fellow in Science and Technology Studies at Harvey Mudd College. She holds a PhD in English from Duke University, along with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Her professional and research interests include transatlantic literature from the nineteenth century to present, the environmental humanities, American studies, plant studies, science and technology studies, and public humanities. Recent conference presentations include the American Studies Association and Petrocultures. Her current book project, tentatively titled Vegetal Forms, shows how scientific narratives of plant life shape the racialized and gendered hierarchies undergirding the concept of the human. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Duke University, Harvey Mudd College, and the American Philosophical Society. 

My publications to date trace the efforts of employers, managers, and their allies to sell American workers on the rewards of work since 1900 within broader historical contexts, especially management crusades against labor unions and the New Deal. I chart this history in my 2020 book, Work Better, Live Better: Motivation, Labor, and Management Ideology (University of Massachusetts Press). My current research projects center on punk, post-punk, and cultural memory in spaces such as podcasting, museums, and memoirs.

Research Interests:

Work & Society; Management Ideologies; Workplace Propaganda; Punk, Post-Punk and Cultural Memory

Research Interests: War and American Culture, Disabled Veterans, Zoos and War, American Studies, Modern US History, Disability Studies, Zoo Studies, Bodies and War

I am a historian of war and society in 20th-century America, with a special interest in the effects of war on American bodies, institutions, and ideas. 

To date, my research has led down two distinct, yet overlapping paths. 

The first path traces the history of disabled veterans in modern American society. In 2015, I published Paying With Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press), which examines changing attitudes toward disabled veterans in the decades surrounding World War I. In 2022, I co-edited the anthology Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (University of Massachusetts Press), and I continue to write and lecture widely on disabled veterans in the United States, both past and present. 

The second path examines how zoos —both in the United States and around the globe—have been transformed during periods of military conflict. 

I've visited zoos and archives in New York, London, Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, San Diego, Honolulu, Wroclaw (Poland), Prague, Chicago, and Berlin. This research culminated in my book World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. 

Looking ahead, I remain committed to researching war and society in American history. My most recent project, They Are Dead, And Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in February 2026. It is co-edited with Civil War historian Jennifer M. Murray. 

I am currently working on three book projects. 

The first is a book on alligators for Reaktion Books' "Animal" Series. 

The second is a true crime history about the intersection of murder, psychopathy, and deviance in World War II Mississippi.

And the third is a co-edited volume (with OSU faculty member Matthew Schauer) on animal trade and American empire in modern history. 

My work focuses on the role of television in the mediation of American politics with a particular focus on issues of war and representation. My first book (Terrorism TV, UKP 2012) examined the role of television in managing popular assent to the War on Terrorism. I am also author of a text book on popular culture (Interrogating Popular Culture, Routledge 2014) and co-editor of a collection of essays (American Militarism on the Small Screen, Routledge 2016) about the representation of the US military on television from WWII to today. My current manuscript (under contract at U of Illinois Press) examines the American Forces Network, a global network of radio and television stations available to US military members serving overseas since 1943. It is a cultural history of the service, its transmission networks, and its effects on U.S. service personnel, their families, and civilian "eavesdroppers" in places like Panama, Vietnam, Korea, Germany, and Japan.