Kate Craig

Education

PhD, University of California Los Angeles

MA, University of California Los Angeles

BS, California Institute of Technology

About Me

Kate Craig received her PhD and MA from the University of California Los Angeles and her BS from the California Institute of Technology. She joined the history faculty at Auburn in 2015. 

Her research interests include the complexities of religion in the central Middle Ages, travel and mobility within the pre-modern world, and the application of natural scientific and digital techniques to medieval history.

Her first book project, Traveling Bones: Relic Mobility and Conflict in the Central Middle Ages examines the movement of relics (the body parts of saints) within northwestern Europe as flashpoints for devotion and conflict. Beginning in the mid-tenth century, relics were frequently taken on out-and-back journeys which placed them into a liminal state, characterized both by power and vulnerability. To move a relic was to open a conversation, as its audiences were confronted with the opportunity to reflect publicly on their relationship to the relic and its curators, to be swept up into the performance of extreme devotion, or to go on the attack. These possibilities had serious consequences, since relics and the cult of saints lay at the heart of central medieval social, economic, and religious power. Thus Traveling Bones argues for the necessity of understanding central medieval religion as multivocal and contested, while emphasizing that pre-modern mobility is more than a line on a map from point A to point B. This research was funded in part by a Fulbright fellowship, a Romani fellowship (UCLA), a grant from the Mellon Foundation, and a Lindsay Young Visiting Faculty fellowship from the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

At Auburn, Craig offers special topics courses on medieval history and regularly teaches HIST 3310: Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as teaching World History I and Historian's Craft. She loves using Reacting to the Past games and ArcGIS story maps in her courses, and her Honors World History I course is entirely comprised of three Reacting to the Past games. She encourages all those interested in graduate study in medieval history at Auburn to contact her before applying. 

Craig was named Outstanding Faculty Member for the Auburn Honors College for 2018-19. She serves on the advisory board of the Journal of Tourism History and has served as the editor of Comitatus.  

Research Interests

Medieval European history, religious history, history of travel and tourism

Publications

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Fighting for Sacred Space: Relic Mobility and Conflict in Tenth- Eleventh-Century France,” Viator 48, no. 1 (Spring 2017), 17-37.
• “The Saint at the Gate: Giving Relics a ‘Royal Entry’ in Eleventh- to Twelfth-Century France,” in Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz, ed. Yuen-Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez (New York: Routledge, 2017), 121-133.

Courses Taught

• HIST 1010: World History I 
• HIST 1017: Honors World History I (Reacting to the Past)
• HIST 3310: Europe in the Middle Ages
• HIST 3800: Historian's Craft
• HIST 3970: Special Topics - Medieval Travel and Travelers
• HIST 5970/6970: Special Topics - Medieval Christianities
• HIST 8710: Introduction to the Teaching of History