Historian, Author, Educator
Dr. Kristen Epps is a historian of slavery, the sectional conflict, and the Civil War. She is an associate professor at Kansas State University, where she offers both undergraduate and graduate courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Kansas history, the American West, and African American history, as well as lower-division U.S. surveys and historical methods. She is also interested in the intersections between religious history, reform movements (particularly abolition), and women's history. Kristen also serves as the editor of Kansas History.
Her first book, Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras, was published in 2016 by the University of Georgia Press as part of the Early American Places series. She contributed to the anthology Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border and published in Kansas History in 2017. A forthcoming, co-authored narrative history of Kansas is under advance contract with The University Press of Kansas and is expected to appear in 2024.
Kristen earned her Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 2010, where she received two dissertation awards, including the Marnie and Bill Argersinger Graduate School Award, awarded to the best dissertation across the university. She completed her master's degree at The College of William and Mary and her bachelor's degree at William Jewell College. She has worked for the University of Central Arkansas, University of Kansas, Colorado State University-Pueblo, and the Kansas Historical Society. She completed her editorial training at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and recently served as Digital Media Editor at The Journal of the Civil War Era.
In her free time, she enjoys hiking, knitting, cooking, and spending time with her family.