Kathleen Crowther

A.B. Magna cum laude, Chemistry and History, Bryn Mawr College, 1991 

Ph.D., History of Science, Medicine and Technology, The Johns Hopkins University, 2001

I have been a member of the History of Science department of the University of Oklahoma since 2002. I am also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. My areas of specialization are early modern science and medicine, history of the book, women’s history and Reformation history. My first book, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2010), won a prize for best book in Reformation history the year it came out. I have published articles on early science and medicine in Isis, The Journal of the History of Astronomy, and Renaissance Quarterly, as well as several chapters in edited, peer-reviewed volumes. I have also written for popular audiences at The Atlantic, Washington Post, Gastro Obscura, Popula, The Public Medievalist and Nursing Clio. My current book project is a study of how an obscure medieval astronomy text, Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De sphaera, shaped modern science.

Curriculum vitae (pdf)

Early modern science and medicine; body and gender in early modern Europe; science and religion

The Book Everybody Read, under contract with Princeton University Press.

Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Scientific Revolution, with Peter Barker, under contract with Routledge.

Policing Pregnant Bodies from Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023; Audiobook - Recorded Books, 2024.

“The Secrets of Women and Medieval Reproductive (In)justice,” part of “Medieval Reproductive Justice (A Roundtable)” at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 10, 2024.

“‘Take a Secondine of a sound and health full body, and distill it’: Averting miscarriage in early modern Europe,” American Association for the History of Medicine Meeting, Ann Arbor, MI, May 2023.

“Averting Miscarriage in Early Modern Europe” History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals 65:2 (2023): 199-209.

“The Virgin and the Globe: The Cosmology of Sor María de Ágreda” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2021): 29-56.

“The Anatomy of Generation: Debates about Ensoulment in the Reformation” in Ute Lotz-Heumann and Susan Karant-Nunn (eds.), The Cultural History of the Reformations: Theories and Applications Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 164 (Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, 2021), pp. 195-209.

“Miracles, Secrets and Wonders: Jakob Horst and Christian Natural Philosophy in German Protestantism Before 1650” in Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz (eds.), Religion and Science in Europe 1650-1750: Physico-theology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

“Sacrobosco’s Sphere in Portugal and Spain” in Matteo Valleriani (ed.), The Authors of the Early Modern Commentaries on De sphaera (Springer, 2020), pp. 161-184.

“Teaching Beyond the Kitchen: Recipes and Experiments in the Scientific Revolution,” part of a roundtable on “Teaching Beyond the Canon” at the History of Science Society, October 10, 2020.

Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.