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 second book, Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation appeared with Palgrave Macmillan in July 2023. Since 2015 she collaborated as historical advisor with Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala on their feature film DES TEUFELS BAD (The Devil’s Bath). The film premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival and was awarded a Silver Bear. The film's female protagonist Agnes Lizlfellner is based on historical trial records of two real-life child-killers, Eva Lizlfellnerin, beheaded in Upper Austria in 1762, and Agnes Catherina Schickin, tried in Württemberg in 1704. Both women feature in Kathy Stuart’s recent book, Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), two among hundreds of such perpetrators that Stuart uncovered in the Holy Roman Empire between 1580 and 1839.Read more about this authorRead less about this author