Katherine Dauge-Roth

Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

Katherine Dauge-Roth’s scholarly interests span the literature, history and culture of the early modern Francophone world, with a focus on the history of the body and material culture. 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 Americas from the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries and includes work on Native American and pilgrimage tattooing, criminal branding, devotional stigmata, and the devil’s mark on witches. She co-edited, with historian Craig Koslofsky, a collective volume on Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023), whose chapters bring together scholars from multiple disciplines to examine body marking from a global perspective. Katherine has also published articles on demonology, textual amulets, graffiti, maternal imagination, women and the moon, criminal branding, popular healing, forensic medicine, and teaching the early modern.

Professor Dauge-Roth is currently engaged in several article projects on race thinking in the early 17th century, one of which was supported in summer 2023 by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a member of the Early Modern Race reading group and the Skin Studies reading group. She serves as the Executive Director of the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies and as President of Bowdoin’s Alpha of Maine chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Professor Dauge-Roth loves teaching across the Francophone Studies curriculum, from elementary language courses through upper-level seminars. She enjoys sharing her research interests with her students in seminars on the history of the body, race and gender, representing the occult, and the fait divers in journalism, literature, and film. She regularly teaches the section’s innovative “Spoken Word and Written Text” course, which examines oral as well as written sources from the Middle Ages through the abolition of enslavement in 1848 to tell a more complete story of what will become the Francophone world. In “Contemporary France through the Media,” her students hone their cultural analysis and argumentative skills, navigating the politics and pressing social issues facing France today though dynamic multi-media units.

Katherine Dauge-Roth is deeply committed to inclusive pedagogy and to the development of her students’ linguistic and cultural fluency, critical analysis, presentation, and writing skills across the curriculum. She won the Karofsky Teaching Prize in 2005 and has authored and co-authored with Charlotte Daniels several articles on teaching the early modern period and contemporary France.