Katrina Ponti is an Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center's International Security Program and Applied History Project. Her book project, Virtuous Emulations of Liberty, is a history of how American citizen diplomats created strategies to help shape a global environment favorable to U.S. interests and how they created a previously unseen type of democratic diplomacy at the beginning of the long nineteenth century, 1780–1820.

Katrina received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Rochester. Born and raised in central Pennsylvania, she received a B.A. in Political Science from Penn State University and her M.A. in history from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. She has explored the interaction between history and policy through her participation in the Morgenthau fellowship at the Notre Dame International Security Center, as well as a Fulbright fellowship with the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is also a Junior Scholar at the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network at the Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

In addition to her historical research, Katrina is trained as an archaeologist. In the summer she can often be found on Bermuda helping to excavate Jamestown's sister colony.