Meet Erin Kathleen Rowe

Erin Kathleen Rowe is a Professor History at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA), where she is also the Vice Dean for Undergraduate Education in the Krieger School for Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD in Early Modern History at Johns Hopkins University, and taught history at the University of Oregon and University of Virginia before returning to JHU in 2012. Her research and teaching focuses on early modern Spain, Portugal, and the Iberian Atlantic; she analyzes religious culture, gender, and race, with a particular emphasis on the complex histories of devotions to saints.

In addition to numerous published journal articles and essays, Professor Rowe’s first book, entitled Saint and Nation: Santiago, Teresa of Avila, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain was published with Penn State University Press in 2011. This book analyzed the bitter debate that ensued in the Kingdom Castile over who should be the patron saint of Spain – its traditional patron, Santiago, alone or with a companion patron, Teresa of Avila. In 2017, she co-edited a collection of essays with Kimberly Lynn entitled The Early Modern Hispanic World: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches, published in 2017 with Cambridge University Press.  Her second book, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. It explores the birth, growth, and decline of devotion to Black saints in the Catholic world, and the entanglement of devotion to Black saints with the transatlantic slave trade. The following year, Black Saints was awarded two prizes.