Anna Katharina Rudolph

Biography

• Ph.D., History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• M.A., History, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Classics, University of California, Davis
• B.A., History and French, Summa Cum Laude, University of California Riverside

Anna Katharina Rudolph is a postdoctoral research associate for the Global Catholic Research Initiative (GCRI) and the Medieval Institute. Her work with GCRI includes planning international convenings on global Catholicism, cultivating networks of scholars across Notre Dame and beyond, and developing projects that foreground the study of women religious and their archives. Through this work, she seeks to open new conversations about how local religious histories can be brought into dialogue with the global study of Catholicism.

Rudolph is a historian whose research is driven by questions of how the sacred intersects with the political to define women’s roles over time and across space. Her work interrogates how religion and politics intersect to shape women’s authority and public roles in pre-modern France, with particular attention to the ways women navigated social limitations by using religion to achieve political power. Across her scholarship, teaching, and public history work, she approaches European history within a global framework, attentive to how the legacies of the past continue to inform questions of identity, belonging, and power.

Her first monograph, Rewriting History and the Myth of the French Nation: The Hagiography of Radegund of Poitiers from Medieval to Modernity (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), published with a book subvention from the Medieval Academy of America, uses the global “afterlife” of the Frankish queen-saint Radegund of Poitiers (520–587) to investigate the complex relationship between hagiography, gender, and the construction of national identities.

Rudolph has published extensively on models of women’s sanctity, including “From Runaway Wife to Sainted Queen: Scandal and the Model of Saintly Queenship in the Early Middle Ages” in Medieval Work, Worship and Power: Persuasive and Silenced Voices (Routledge: 2025), and an original translation and critical introduction to the Life of Radegund by the twelfth-century theologian Hildebert of Lavardin (Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History, Winter 2026). She is also co-editor of The Global Movement of Objects in Catholic Cultures (forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press) and a contributing author to the volume. Her chapter examines a series of photo-postcards from a French mission in the northern Congo dedicated to Radegund, tracing how pre-modern sacred history was mobilized to support the French colonial “civilizing mission” at the turn of the twentieth century.

As part of her ongoing work on women’s history, Rudolph has begun a second book project on Charlotte-Flandrine d’Orange-Nassau (1579–1640), abbess of the Abbey of Sainte-Croix de Poitiers and daughter of William the Silent Prince of Orange, whose life and writings illuminate women’s religious and political authority in the increasingly globalizing world of Reformation-era Europe.

Prior to joining the University of Notre Dame, Rudolph was a postdoctoral research fellow at Saint Louis University’s Center for Research on Global Catholicism, where she directed the St. Louis Catholic Archives Collective, a digital humanities initiative designed to expand the study of women’s monasticism by increasing the visibility and accessibility of local archives of women religious. Through digital exhibits, public history events, curriculum design, and research grants, the project repositioned local religious histories within global networks stretching from St. Louis to Europe, Latin America, and Asia.