Katherine McKenna, Ph.D.

Teagle Postdoctoral Fellow
University Undergraduate Core

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Courses Taught

The Cosmos in the Premodern Imagination; Witch Midwife Healer Scholar: Women and Science in the Premodern World

Education

• Ph.D., History, Vanderbilt University, 2019
• Certificate in Gender Studies

Practice Areas

Katherine McKenna is a historian of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean world. She researches and writes about the civic lives of women and the interplay of gender, culture, power, and print in Renaissance Venice. Her research has appeared in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Routledge Resources Online - The Renaissance World. A book chapter on the feminist politics of Lucrezia Marinella’s epic poetry is forthcoming with Classiques Garnier. Her book project, entitled Fashioning Adria, Fashioning Femininity: Women Writers and the Pursuit of Civic Feminism in Renaissance Venice, explores the movement of secular Venetian women onto the book market and the feminist turn of the local querelle des femmes at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Katherine is also interested in histories of science and the body across the premodern past. As the Teagle Postdoctoral Scholar at Saint Louis University, she teaches courses on the long history of natural philosophy and leads initiatives to support core education in the humanities through innovative pedagogy design at the intersection of the humanities and STEM.