Katherine McKenna, Ph.D.
Teagle Postdoctoral Fellow
University Undergraduate Core
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.