Katharine Brophy Dubois

A USA Today bestselling novelist of more than twenty historical romance novels as Katharine Ashe, including three awarded places on Amazon's Best Books of the Year lists, I teach part-time at Duke.  My courses explore representations in popular culture of medieval religion, gender and sexuality, as well as the history of the popular romance novel and the romance fiction industry.  As co-founder and host of the UNSUITABLE Speakers Series about women, history and popular fiction, I am delighted to welcome scholars, artists and industry professionals to campus to dialogue with students and Duke community members and to learn from each other.

As a full-time academic until 2007, my research interests included religious belief and practice in medieval Latin Christendom, especially penance, pilgrimage, penitential devotion, saints' cults, and relics. My dissertation, Strangers and Sojourners: Pilgrimage and Pilgrims in Late-Medieval Rome, traced the early history of the Roman Jubilee, a year-long celebration of penitential pilgrimage to the city's ancient shrines. I remain interested in medieval notions of charity, charitable institutions, and the understanding of spiritual community that bound the living and the dead.

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