Degrees

• PhD, University of Chicago, 1997
• MA, University of Chicago, 1991
• AB, Columbia University, 1988

Research Area

• Early Modern French History; European gender and sexuality studies

Professional Societies

• American Historical Association; Western Society for French History; Renaissance Society of America; Sixteenth Century Studies; Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Professional Honors

• Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship, 2006-2007
• Vanderbilt University Research Scholars Grant, 2006-2007
• Fellow, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, 2005-6 (Pre-modern Others: Race and Sexuality).
• Fellow, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, 2002-3 (Gender, Sexuality, and Political Action)
• Vanderbilt University Research Scholars Grant, 2002
• Millstone Fellowship Prize, Western Society for French History, 2002
• Venture Fund, Cultural Virtual Reality Project, 2002

Selected Publications

• Books
• Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France. Harvard University Press, 2004.
• European Sexualities, 1400-1800. New Approaches to European History. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Selected Articles
• “Privilege, Possibility, and Perversion: Rethinking the Study of Early Modern Sexuality,” The Journal of Modern History. 2006.
• “Constructing Evil Foreign Queens.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 2006.
• “Discursive Deviance: Sexual Slander and Politics during the Regency of Philippe d’Orléans.” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, ed. Barry Rothaus. Vol. 29, (2003), 255-62.
• “Love, Sodomy, and Scandal: Controlling the Sexual Reputation of Henry III.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12/4 (Oct. 2003) 513-42.
• “The Politics of Promiscuity: Masculinity and Heroic Representation at the Court of Henry IV.” French Historical Studies, 26: 2 (Spring 2003), 225-52.
• "Catherine de Médicis and the Performance of Political Motherhood." Sixteenth Century Journal. XXXI/3 (Fall, 2000), 643-73.

Biography

Katherine Crawford received her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1997, where she was subsequently a Harper Postdoctoral Fellow for two years. Since coming to Vanderbilt, she has taught courses on gender and sexuality, including “Early Modern Sexualities,” “Sexuality and Gender to 1700,” “Sexuality and Gender since 1700,” “Women in the Renaissance,” and “Pornography and Prostitution in History.” In addition to teaching Western Civilization, she also teaches courses on the history of France (“France: Renaissance to Enlightenment;” “The French Revolution”) and theory (“Theory and Practice for Historians;” “Historical Methods”).

Her first book, Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2004), examines the political dynamics created by the need to utilize queen mothers as regents when their underage sons became kings. Beginning with Catherine de Médicis, the political structures of governance had to be reconfigured to accommodate a woman acting in place of the king. Developed as an institution by Marie de Médicis (on behalf of Louis XIII) and Anne d’Autriche (on behalf of Louis XIV), regency became a female political form in France. When a man, Philippe d’Orléans, became regent for Louis XV, the politics of gender shaped his regency in significant ways that marked the monarchy until the end of the Old Regime. Indeed, the politics of regency figured in the French Revolution, where royalists considered Marie-Antoinette to be a regent after Louis XVI’s execution. Overall, the story is one in which the gendering of political authority that occurred in regencies affected the “normal” political situation by facilitating the gradual expansion of royal authority. Makeshift efforts to compensate for the gender deficiencies of regents, both female and male, produced consistent pressure for political innovation in the direction of greater royal authority. Regencies and regents, along with the anxieties and the various compensatory structures they produced, provide a means to analyze the conjunctions of event, circumstance, and person that alter the semantic field upon which gender and politics combine.

Crawford’s second book, European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) is part of the New Approaches to European History series. Designed for classroom use, this book offering a synthetic interpretation of developments in and scholarship on sexuality, particularly taking into account the influences of women’s history, social history, and the discourse theory of Michel Foucault. Topics include marriage and family, religion and sexuality, science and medicine, crime and social control, and deviancy and the culture of sex. Utilizing material from across Europe, European Sexualities presents both controversies within the historical literature and new interpretations of source materials.

Crawford has begun work on a third book, tentatively entitled The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance. The premise of this project is that the French Renaissance organized sex and sexuality in strange ways. Sexual expression, neither solely defined as a matter of identity nor merely restricted to individual acts, generated an intersecting and contradictory set of articulations. It occupied, saturated, and organized modes of thinking to which we, for the most part, have little access. These modes now seem to us to require translation in more than one sense. Sex, as it was understood in the French Renaissance, was less a breeding-ground for modernity than it was a synecdoche that allowed for an elastic understanding of sexuality. In other words, the transactions between and among physical bodies opened up a language for the deployment of sexuality that had wide-ranging implications for issues ranging from sovereignty through nationalism to gender-, race-, and class-based identities.

Articles related to these projects have appeared in The Sixteenth Century Journal, French Historical Studies, Renaissance and Reformation, The Journal of Modern History, and The Journal of the History of Sexuality.