Episode 2 • Kathy Stuart

Kathy Stuart is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the history of criminal justice, deviance, marginality and gender in early modern Germany. Her first book, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge UP, 1999), received the biennial Hans Rosenberg Book Prize in 2001. Defiled Trades appeared in German translation in 2008 as Unehrliche Berufe : Status Und Stigmata in Der Frühen Neuzeit Am Beispiel Augsburgs. Her article “Suicide by Proxy: The Unintended Consequences of Public Executions in eighteenth-century Germany,” Central European History, 41 (2008), was awarded the biennial Annelise Thimme Article Prize in 2010. Her second book, Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation appeared with Palgrave Macmillan in July 2023. Since 2015 she has collaborated as historical advisor with Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala on their feature film Des Teufel’s Bad (The Devil’s Bath), that premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht was awarded a Silver Bear for “outstanding artistic contribution.”