Katherine Dauge-Roth

KATHERINE DAUGE-ROTH is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she teaches courses in Francophone Studies. Her scholarly work focuses on the history of the body, medicine, and material culture in the early modern period. She is the author of Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (Routledge, 2020), which examines the marked body in Europe and the North American colonies from the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries and, with historian Craig Koslofsky, a collective volume on Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023).

She has published articles on demonology, textual amulets, maternal imagination, criminal branding, popular healing, forensic medicine, and teaching the early modern. She is currently finishing several article projects on race thinking in the seventeenth century, one of which was initially supported by a 2023 summer grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is preparing a monograph that includes a critical edition of a 1640 conference on blackness that took place in Paris at Théophraste Renaudot’s Bureau d’adresse et de rencontre.

She also has work underway on her next book project, Lunatics: Men, Women and the Moon in Early Modern France, which puts into dialogue early modern scientific, popular, and literary texts and images that used the moon to reinforce or challenge traditional gender roles. She served as the Executive Director of the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies from 2005 to 2025.