Katie Harris
Aug. 30, 1969-Feb. 11, 2025
Berkeley, California

Alice (Katie) Kittrell Harris died February 11, 2025, at her home in Berkeley, California, from a rare pancreatic cancer. Born in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Joseph Harris and Nancy Flowers, she grew up in Palo Alto, California, where she attended Castilleja School. She graduated from Oberlin College and received her Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University.

A professor of history at UC Davis, Katie joked she was dragooned into the family business: her father, step-father, step-mother, an aunt, and an uncle were all academics. A winner of the Rome Prize, she delighted in greeting the Swiss guards at the Vatican Library by name and hobnobbing with tonsured librarians in dusty Sardinian monasteries. Her research focused on early modern Spain with a special interest in the transmission of religious concepts and practices. Indicative of her wide-ranging scholarship, her most recent book, The Stolen Bones of St. John of Matha: Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century, was praised by a reviewer as a “sophisticated examination of epistemology in the seventeenth century” that “draws upon an impressive range of manuscript collections and archives in Rome, Sardinia, Madrid, Mallorca, and Granada.”

Katie’s interests ranged far beyond academia. She was a notorious wit, an irreverent social commentator, a gifted gardener, a daring style setter, and a devoted “sports mom.” She liked to dance until the sweat poured. She liked to get up early and smell the morning air. She had an eye for fabrics and colors, and assembled striking costumes and beautiful furnishings. She loved her label-maker and her glue gun.

Katie loved fiercely and was fiercely loved. Her loss is keenly felt by her beloved son, Arvid Forsman; her parents; her step-parents Ted Andersson and Monika Totten; her sisters Sonja Totten-Harris and Elizabeth Harris and their partners, Diana Ovalle and Jed Parsons; her nephew Oliver Parsons, and many loyal friends, especially Liz Steinfield and Eric Forsman.