Kristen Epps is currently an associate professor of American history at Kansas State University. 

She earned her doctorate at the University of Kansas in 2010 and won two dissertation awards for her examination of slavery and emancipation on the Kansas-Missouri line, which formed the basis of her book, Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. She has also published in Kansas History and is a former employee of the Kansas Historical Society.