Kathryn Marshalek

Postdoctoral Fellow

Kathryn Marshalek is a historian of early modern Britain and Europe. Her research centers the European post-Reformation predicament: the destabilizing force of persistent religious pluralism both within and between states after the legal and doctrinal Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century. She is broadly interested in post-Reformation Catholicism, popular political communication, new diplomatic history, parliamentary history, and resistance theory.

She received her PhD from Vanderbilt in 2024. Her dissertation, “Dynastic Politics and Religious Difference: English Catholics and the Crisis of the 1620s,” explored how geopolitical circumstances at the start of the Thirty Years War allowed for English Catholics to call the existing religio-political settlement into radical question. In 2023, this project was awarded the Louise A. Taylor Scholarship from the Vanderbilt Graduate School for the “most promising dissertation research in the humanities.” 

Dr. Marshalek has presented her work at the Tudor & Stuart History Seminar and the Religious History of Britian Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research; the Early Modern Britain Seminar at the University of Oxford; the University of Arkansas; the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies; and the North American Conference on British Studies. Her work has been supported by the Royal Historical Society, the Russel G. Hamilton Graduate Leadership Institute, and the Huntington Library.  

In 2022, she published an article in Renaissance Quarterly, “Luisa de Carvajal in Anglo-Spanish Contexts, 1605-14,” which won the 2023 Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize for the best essay on women in the history of Christianity, awarded by the American Society of Church History. A second article, “Putting the Catholics back in: the ‘rise of Arminianism’ reconsidered,” has been published in Historical Research.

She has a forthcoming article, on anti-popery in the 1624 Parliament, with The English Historical Review, and a forthcoming chapter in King James VI and I, 1566–1625, eds. Alexander Courtney and Michael Questier (Routledge, 2025).