Katherine Unterman

Dr. Katherine (Kate) Unterman specializes in the history of American law, with an emphasis on the late 19th and 20th centuries. She created and currently runs the History Department’s Legal History Certificate, heads the Law and Society Working Group at the Glasscock Center, and is the faculty advisor for the Texas A&M Undergraduate Journal of Law and Society. She received a Master’s in Legal Studies from Stanford Law School and a PhD in History from Yale University.

Dr. Unterman’s scholarship concentrates on the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as the role of law in American foreign relations. Her book Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders (Harvard University Press) tells the history of the evolution of extradition law in the late 19th century. In a broader sense, it is an examination of changing views about America’s connection to the rest of the world, the nature of threats from abroad, and how the law was used to extend of U.S. power beyond its borders.

She has also published works about the Insular Cases, a series of early-20th-century Supreme Court decisions about the legal status of “unincorporated” territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa, and about the philosopher and psychologist William James. She is currently researching the legal status of anarchists in the early 20th century, especially how medical and quarantine regulations were used to target anarchists who had not broken any criminal laws. Her articles have appeared in Law and History Review,  the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Modern American History, among other places. She has also contributed chapters to the Wiley-Blackwell companions to U.S. Foreign Relations and the companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Dr. Unterman has received nationally-competitive fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and American Historical Association (AHA) to support her research.

She is currently serving as the History Department’s Director of Graduate Studies.