Katherine McKenna
NEH/Teagle Postdoctoral Research Associate
Affiliation: History and Philosophy of Science
Katherine McKenna is a National Endowment for the Humanities/Teagle Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values where she teaches courses on premodern science and the cultural history of cosmology. She is also working on Notre Dame's implementation of the Cornerstone: Learning for Living grant which aims to build lines of connection between humanities disciplines and STEM fields while supporting Core education.
Katherine's research interests lie in the history of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean world with a focus on women and gender. Her book project Fashioning Adria, Fashioning Femininity: Women Authors and the Pursuit of Civic Feminism in Renaissance Venice explores the movement of secular women writers into single-author print and the advent of protofeminist discourse in the Venetian Republic in conjunction with sixteenth-century civic crisis. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Her publications include “Women in the Garden: The Decameron Reimagined in Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne” (Early Modern Women, 2019) and “Siren of Venice: Lucrezia Marinella and Civic Myth-Making as a Feminist Tool (forthcoming with Classiques Garnier).
Email: kmcken25@nd.edu