Erin Kathleen Rowe

Assistant Professor (2008)

Director of Graduate Admissions (Non-US History)

Office Hours: MW 10-12 and by appointment

Office: Nau 233

Phone: (434) 924-7687

Email: erowe (at) virginia.edu

Fields & Specialties

Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean; Saints and Sanctity

BA Washington College (1996)

PhD The Johns Hopkins University (2005)

Saint and Nation: Teresa of Avila, Santiago, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain. (Penn State University Press, 2011.)   For more information, see:  http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03773-8.html

“St. Teresa and Olivares: Patron Sainthood, Royal Favorites, and the Politics of Plurality in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” Sixteenth Century Journal 37, no. 3 (2006), 721-737.

“The Spanish Minerva: Imagining Teresa of Avila as Patron Saint in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” The Catholic Historical Review, vol. XCVII, no. 3 (October, 2006), 416-438.

 University of Virginia Summer Research Grant 2009 & 2011

NEH Summer Institute (Berber North Africa)    2007
Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society    2006
American Academy in Rome Visiting Scholar    2006
(a non-stipendiary residential program)
Junior Professor Development Fund, University of Oregon    2006
New Faculty Award, University of Oregon    2006
Spencer Brush Fellowship, University of Oregon    2005 - 2007
The Johns Hopkins University Dean’s Teaching Fellowship    2005
William J. Fulbright Fellowship    2002 - 2003
Program for Cultural Cooperation, Spanish Ministry
of Culture and US Universities Research Grant    2002
JHU, Department of History, Propaedeutic Fellowship    1998 - 1999

I am currently working on my next major project, provisionally entitled African Saints: Race, Gender, and Sanctity in the Early Modern Catholic World, which examines the circulation of sub-Saharan African saints' cults the period of globalizing Christianity.  From the mid-fifteenth century on, missionaries took to the oceans alongside merchants and explorers, establishing missions and converting local people in the Americas, Africa, India, China, and Japan.  In spite of the zeal with which missionaries spread across the globe, few non-white saints or members of the clergy emerged.   Thus, the arrival of black saints into European devotion marks a moment of tremendous significance.  On one hand, black slaves and freedmen were marginalized groups, visibly separated by a skin color increasingly associated with slavery; on the other hand, black populations became incorporated (however unequally) into European cities as Christian subjects.   Out of this population of new converts eventually emerged contemporary holy people, some of whom were ultimately recognized as saints themselves.  The story of the progress of black saints throughout the increasingly globalized Catholic world provides a microcosmic look at the complex ways black Africans became a part of Europe and its earliest colonies in Latin America, and reveals the complexity with which Europeans responded and adapted to the black population in its midst.  My study contributes to our knowledge of early modern ideas about racial difference, how the Church viewed racial inequality in light of the Christian promise of spiritual equality, and how preachers and artists represented black saints.