Katherine A.S. Sibley

Katherine A.S. Sibley, Ph.D. is Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Her work on American first ladies has been featured in numerous outlets including C-SPAN, the Guardian, the BBC, and on the George W. Bush Center’s “Ladies, First” podcast. In March, she organized a conference at the Center for Presidential History on Southern First Ladies, and is editing a volume based on that conference to be published by the University Press of Kansas. In 2016, she published A Companion to First Ladies (2016), and her most recent monograph, First Lady Florence Harding: Behind the Tragedy and Controversy (2009) led her to write and perform a short play on Florence’s life. Sibley received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has served for twelve years on the Historical Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of State. Her interests also include early Soviet-American relations and she is organizing a conference later this fall at Williams College, “One Hundred Years of Communism in the USA: the CPUSA at Home and Abroad Since 1919”.