In Memoriam: Katie Harris
Katie Harris (1969–2025) was a member of the UC Davis History Department for two decades, teaching early modern European history. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in Palo Alto, she was known to joke about being “dragooned” into the family business of academia. In fact, coercion was unnecessary. When asked about her career path in a 2019 interview on the UC Davis radio station, Katie recounted that she had wanted to be a historian for as long as she could remember, even “playing professor” during make-believe games with her sister as a child. As a history major at Oberlin, Katie initially focused on Latin America. While studying abroad in Córdoba, however, she became enchanted by the beauty of Andalucía and its rich, tangled, multicultural past. This experience set her on the path to study early modern Spain, leading her to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where she completed her PhD in 2001. After four years at Georgia State University, she arrived in Davis via Rome, where she was a fellow at the American Academy in 2004–2005, having won the prestigious Rome Prize.
An expert on the history of early modern Spain and Catholicism, Katie was an inveterate archive rat who wrote two books about forgery and identity formation based on research in Granada, Seville, Madrid, Mallorca, Sardinia, Rome, and Vatican City. In From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), she explored how, in the wake of the Reconquista, the people of early modern Granada built a Catholic civic identity on the basis of forged Arabic documents and bogus relics. Unearthed in the 1590s, the Plomos or Lead Books of Granada told the previously unknown story of Granada’s supposed first bishop, St. Cecilio, an Arab Christian martyr from the time of the apostles. Unlike previous studies, which had focused on the Plomos’ fabrication by Moriscos (Arab converts to Catholicism and their descendants), Katie instead examined their reception among Granada’s non-Morisco population. For the culturally precarious Moriscos, the pseudo-history told in the Plomos was an attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—to establish an identity that was simultaneously Christian, Spanish, and Arabic. For Granada’s “old Christians,” it offered a solution to a different problem: the lack of an ancient Christian pedigree for a city that had been ruled by Muslims for seven centuries prior to 1492. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Katie demonstrated the spectacular success (despite doubts about the Plomos’ authenticity, which led to their confiscation and eventual condemnation by the Vatican) of Granadinos’ project “to locate their city upon a new historical terrain, refiguring their civic identity and imagining themselves as the legitimate heirs of an ancient Christian heritage.”
In The Stolen Bones of St. John of Matha: Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023), Katie examined another case of inventing the past while expanding into new thematic and geographic territory. A microhistory of a “pious fraud,” it tells the story of a group of seventeenth-century Trinitarian friars who robbed graves and forged histories as they sought to establish the sainthood of their founder. This dramatic episode provides the occasion for a wide-ranging investigation of “the cultural meanings and anxieties invested in the relics of the saints and the changing modes of thought with which early modern Catholics approached them.” She was at the top of her game when illness cut short her scholarly career.
Katie took the life of the mind and the craft of scholarship seriously, but not too seriously. Devoid of self-importance and pretension, she had a playful sensibility and a no-nonsense attitude. She brought this winning combination to the classroom, where students appreciated her ability to bring old theological doctrines to life. (Thorny Reformation-era debates about grace and salvation, for example, she explained in terms of the different ways Catholics and Protestants might respond to a turtle found writhing on its back.) She took special pride in passing on to new generations the secret and powerful art of how to “gut a book.” Katie was a steadfast colleague who performed substantial service to the university and profession, including a term as president of the Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, and could be counted on when it mattered most. Her friends and colleagues will miss her generosity, discernment, wit, and love of mischief.