Katie Marshalek
Assistant Professor of Humanities
Biography
Kathryn Marshalek is an Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Center for Humanities. A historian of early modern Britain and Europe, Marshalek’s research is focused on the destabilizing political force of persistent religious pluralism both within and between states in Europe after the legal and doctrinal Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century. She is broadly interested in popular political communication, new diplomatic history, parliamentary studies, and resistance theory. Her research has appeared in the English Historical Review, Journal of British Studies, Historical Research, and Renaissance Quarterly. Marshalek holds a B.A. in European History from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.St. in British and European History from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in History from Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining the Center for Humanities, Marshalek held a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt and subsequently served as an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida.
Marshalek earned her Ph.D. in History from Vanderbilt University (2024), her M.St. in British and European History from the University of Oxford, 1500–Present (2018), and her B.A. in European History from the University of Pennsylvania (2017).
Current Projects
Marshalek’s current book project explores how the geopolitical and dynastic circumstances at the start of the Thirty Years’ War allowed English Catholics to call the existing religious and political settlement into radical question. By centering a transnational Catholic interest in a study of the English crisis of the 1620s, her book reevaluates the effect of persistent confessional division on established topics of seventeenth-century English political history, including the relationship between the crown and parliament, the legal boundaries of royal authority, the tension between religious identity and political loyalty, and the nature of the constitutional challenge of the mid-century.
Publications
Articles & Book Chapters
“Arguing with Catholic Women: Devotion, Polemic, and the Lived Experience of Religion during the Theological Crisis of the 1620s,” Journal of British Studies 65/e34 (2026), 1-23.
“An Unsettled Religious Settlement and the Crisis of the 1620s: English Catholics, Anti-Popery, and the Spanish Match, 1622-4,” The English Historical Review, 140/603 (2025): 367-397.
“(The Legacy of) James’s Common Cause, 1624-1625,” in King James VI and I: Kingship, Government and Religion, eds. Alexander Courtney and Michael Questier (Routledge, 2025), 259-288.
“Putting the Catholics back in: the ‘rise of Arminianism’ reconsidered,” Historical Research 97/276 (2024): 238-258.
“Luisa de Carvajal in Anglo-Spanish Contexts, 1605-1614,” Renaissance Quarterly 75/3 (Fall 2022): 882-916. Awarded the ASCH Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize.