Kathryn Marshalek

Kathryn Marshalek is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. Marshalek is a historian of early modern Britain and Europe. Her 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 work has appeared in The English Historical Review, Historical Research, and Renaissance Quarterly.

Current Project

Marshalek’s current book project explores how the geopolitical and dynastic circumstances at the start of the Thirty Years’ War allowed for English Catholics to call the existing religious and political settlement into radical question. This project demonstrates the remarkable instability of the post-Reformation religious settlement in England and argues for the ability of a Catholic minority to intervene effectively in matters of European political importance. By centering a transnational Catholic revisionary 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.

Courses

• The Origins of the Contemporary West I
• Freedom and Equality (Quest 1)

Education

• Ph.D. in History, Vanderbilt University, 2024
• M.St. in British and European History, 1500-Present (with distinction), University of Oxford, 2018
• B.A. in European History (summa cum laude), University of Pennsylvania, 2017

Publications - Articles

“An Unsettled Religious Settlement and the Crisis of the 1620s: English Catholics, Anti-Popery, and the Spanish Match, 1622-4,” The English Historical Review, ceaf050, 3 April 2025.

“(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.