Dr. Kaitlin Simpson

Kaitlin Simpson is a historian of the United States in a global context. Her research focuses on themes of gender, labor, agriculture, the environment, and the transnational connections that link the U.S. with Latin America and a broader global community. Dr. Simpson’s first book project, The Flowers of El Dorado: Gender, Production, and the Cut Flower Industry in the United States and Colombia analyzes the globalization of the commercial cut flower industry in the late-twentieth century. Today, U.S. consumers spend over $9.2 billion annually on cut flowers, but almost seventy percent of the blooms sold in floral shops and supermarkets across the United States are imported from Colombia. Dr. Simpson’s work examines the history behind this trade and how producers and consumers across the international floriculture industry used the gendered symbolic image of flowers to boost their profits and power. In analyzing the entangled and sometimes contentious histories of the U.S. and Colombian cut flower industries, this research uses flowers to examine how commodity producers and consumers infuse goods and inanimate objects with symbolic power, and how this power can shape national, international, and global relationships and trajectories.

Dr. Simpson is from Monroe, Louisiana where she earned her B.A. in History from the University of Louisiana Monroe. She also holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from the University of Tennessee. Her research has been supported by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Agricultural History Society, and the Economic History Association.

View Dr. Simpson's CV here.