Katherine Rohrer, Ph.D.

Katherine Rohrer's research and teaching interests explore the intersection of gender, race, and religion during the 19th- and early 20th-centry South.  She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation under the working title: “Missionary Mistresses: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Evolution of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930.” It analyzes white women’s religious expressions and actions in a South forever changed by the democratizing influences of the Second Great Awakening yet perpetually confined by long-standing beliefs in racial and sexual subordination.  Looking through a predominantly gendered lens, it examines the ways in which well-educated southern white women used the conservative institution of evangelical Protestant Christianity as an instrument through which they steadily expanded their intellectual and professional capacities as well as their agency and impact at home and throughout the world. 

• Ph.D., American History, University of Georgia, 2015
• M.A., History, University of Georgia, 2007
• A.B. (Magna cum laude), History & Political Science, University of Georgia, 2004

"Leaving Their Mark: Female Students, Faculty, and Leadership Organizations at the University of North Georgia, 1873-Present with Katherine Rose Adams in The University of North Georgia: Essays on the Past, Present, and Future (Dahlonega, GA: University of North Georgia Press, projected publication: 2023).

"Martha Wiliford Payne's (Re)constructions of Race, Gender, and Southern Identity in Missionary Liberia, 1850-1870," Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians, vol. 37(2021): 41-84.

"The Lucy Cobb Institute: Mildred Lewis Rutherford and her Mission to Preserve an Idealized Southern Community" in Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart, eds., Southern Communities: Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019): 230-245.

"Lifting the Veil of Obscurity?: Lucy Webb Hayes, America's First 'First Lady'" in Edward O. Frantz., ed., A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents, 1865-81 (Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014): 475-496.

"Slaveholding Women and the Religious Instruction of Slaves in Post-Emancipation Memory," Journal of Southern Religion, vol. 15 (2013): http://jsreligion.org/issues/vol15/rohrer.html