Katrina B. Olds

Katrina Olds is Professor of History at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches undergraduates a broad range of topics in history and the humanities. Her first monograph, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (Yale, 2015) analyzed the intellectual, cultural, and political effects of a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit’s forged historical texts, and was recognized by the American Catholic Historical Association with its John Gilmary Shea Prize. Her articles on neo-Latin forgeries; the unruly process of authenticating saints’ relics in the Counter Reformation; the eclectic methods of Spanish antiquaries; and relics, saints, and memory in Spain and the Americas have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Catholic Historical Review, and in various edited volumes. She is also co-editor (with Emily Michelson and Jan Machielsen) of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Counter-Reformation Saints and Sainthood. Her current research projects include "The Blasphemous Enlightenment: A Picaresque History of Ideas in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic" and "Irreverent Reverence: Laughter and the Sacred in Early Modern Spain."

Prof. Olds is always happy to engage with students about their academic and intellectual preoccupations; strange histories in the past and present; and grad school, a/k/a, "What should I do with my life?"  In addition to the range of classes that she teaches for the history department on pre-modern Europe, Prof. Olds enjoys offering interdisciplinary courses in the humanities for the Saint Ignatius Institute and the Honors College.

• The Inquisition in Spain and the Americas
• Early modern Catholicism and Counter-Reformation
• History of religious belief and skepticism
• Sexuality, humor, and saints

• Chair, History Department (2023-2025)

• Deans Medal Selection Committee (2023)

• Academic Advisor for USF Study Abroad at Oxford (Blackfriars College and Middlebury Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Programs) (2019-2023) 

• Director, Saint Ignatius Institute (2019-2022) 

• Member, University and College of Arts and Sciences Tenure and Promotion Peer Review Committees (2018-2020)

• PhD and MA, History, Princeton University
• Masters of Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School

• American Council of Learned Societies Fellow (2025-2026)
• John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Short-Term Fellow (2025-2026)
• USF and Faculty Union (USFFA) Distinguished Research Award (2017)
• USF Dean’s Scholar Award (for research of great value/impact) (2015)
• John Gilmary Shea Prize for Best Book of the Year on Catholic History, American Catholic Historical Association (2016)
• Honorable Mention, Best First Book of 2013-15, Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

• Editor, with Emily Michelson and Jan Machielsen, Cambridge Companion to Counter-Reformation Sanctity, Cambridge University Press, 2026.

• "The Material of Memory in the Seventeenth-Century Andes: The Cross of Carabuco and Local History" in Remembering the Reformation, Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace, and Alexandra Walsham eds., Routledge, 2020.

• "Local Antiquaries and the Expansive Sense of the Past: A Case Study from Counter-Reformation Spain" in Local Antiquities, Local Identities: Art, Literature, and Antiquarianism in Early Modern Europe, Kathleen Christian and Bianca Divitiis, eds., Manchester University Press, 2018.

• Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, Yale University Press, 2015.
• "The Ambiguities of the Holy: Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain." Renaissance Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2012): 135-184.