{"id":7048961,"date":"2026-08-27T07:13:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T07:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/new-faculty-spotlight-dr-kate-imy\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T07:13:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T07:13:31","slug":"new-faculty-spotlight-dr-kate-imy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7048961","title":{"rendered":"New Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Kate Imy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Formation<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What first drew you toward the study of history?<\/strong><\/p>\n
My very uncool, non-academic answer is that my first historical obsession was the film Titanic. This resulted not only in seeing the film multiple times in theaters and being there at midnight for the VHS (!) release but collecting each piece of ephemera\u2014from replicated relics to Titanic-themed computer games. As an MA student, I was a docent at the Molly Brown House Museum in Denver, which commemorates the famous Titanic survivor. When I traveled to the UK for my PhD research, I stopped at each \u201cTitanic\u201d point of interest\u2014from the shipyards in Belfast to the port of departure at Southampton and final stop at Cobh (formerly Queenstown), Ireland. These early experiences shaped my understanding of the relationship between public and academic history and how entertainment can make and shape historical arguments.<\/p>\n
Research<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What are the core problems or questions that organize your research?<\/strong><\/p>\n
I am very concerned with how individuals navigate inclusion and exclusion through embodied experiences with power. My first book, Faithful Fighters<\/em>, examined the South Asian troops of the colonial Indian Army who fought for the British Empire in both World Wars. These colonial soldiers were recruited in part because of British perceptions of how soldiers\u2019 religious beliefs contributed to both martial strength and pro-British loyalty. In reality, these soldiers used their proximity to British power, and their religious communities and practices, to challenge the imperial state. My second book, Losing Hearts and Minds<\/em>, explored the soldiers\u2019 and civilians\u2019 growing disillusionment with colonial power in Southeast Asia among populations considered most loyal\u2014 from South Asian soldiers to Eurasian Christians. My in-progress third book, Disabling Divinity<\/em>, uses a disability lens to explore the unexpected global connections between white settler colonialism and fringe religious networks in a tiny woman\u2019s commune. Each work considers how people benefit from, and are burdened by, proximity to state power that forces them to navigate and often internalize marginalization and exclusion based on race, gender, and disability.<\/p>\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n
How would you describe your methodological approach?<\/strong><\/p>\n
I am a story-driven historian and obsessive archival researcher. I tend to gather early seeds of ideas from secondary sources, then search the archive for unique stories that challenge my assumptions. I love finding individual people whose lives cross multiple boundaries\u2014be it racial, ethnic, or gender\u2014or who interact with the world in ways I would not expect.<\/p>\n
Is there a book, scholar, or intellectual tradition that has been especially formative for your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n
I have been deeply shaped by postcolonial theory and feminist scholarship on the military. At the moment, I am interested in histories of settler colonialism and disability studies.<\/p>\n
Have there been moments, whether through engagement with other scholarship or through your own evidence, when your thinking shifted in a significant way?<\/strong><\/p>\n
Having served briefly in the military, I was certain that I would not do a PhD project related in any way to the military. My initial dissertation questions focused on religious interactions between South Asian spiritual leaders and British civilians. I assumed that this would have an exclusively leftist, pacifist, anti-colonial political orientation. Imagine my surprise when I found a British Fascist\u2014Francis Yeats-Brown\u2014who served in India and became a devotee of yoga. Even more interesting, I found another one\u2014J.F.C. Fuller\u2014who served in India and loved yoga and Fascism. While Fuller\u2019s papers were held at Rutgers, where I was working on my PhD, Yeats-Brown\u2019s were held in the Harry Ransom Center, making one of my first PhD research trips to UT! These archival experiences got me to ask deeper questions about violence and conservatism within military institutions and how the racialization of religion shaped both colonial and anticolonial cultures.<\/p>\n
Is there an archival or research experience that stayed with you\u2014even if it never made it into your published work?<\/strong><\/p>\n
When researching in the British Library, requesting \u201cfiles\u201d can mean that you get a giant bound volume containing both your file and files that you did not request. Once, as a graduate student, I decided to flip through the whole volume rather than focus on the one file I requested. There, I found a story of R.A.L. Moysey, a British officer in 1920s India who plotted to kidnap a general\u2019s daughter as leverage to free his Indian male lover from police custody. This story ended up being a cornerstone of my dissertation and first book. It also inspired a screenplay that earned me a place in the Outfest Screenwriting Lab and won the Austin Film Festival\u2019s Josephson Entertainment fellowship. It was a good lesson about being open to finding things where you never expected to look.<\/p>\n
Have you ever encountered something in the archives or in your research that was genuinely funny, strange, or unexpectedly human?<\/strong><\/p>\n
As an animal lover, I always appreciate cat prints on documents, or authors who complain about a cat playing with their pencils as they try to write. All of my published work has been completed with numerous cat companions sitting on computers, attacking my notes, or stealing attention away from work. I appreciate sharing cross-time animal antics.<\/p>\n
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