Tuesday, October 5, 2021
6 p.m. EST
Tognino Hall
The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies presents
The Juncture of Worlds: Scholarship as a Way of Life and Living as a Scholarly Practice
Presented by Mary Corley Dunn, PhD, University of St. Louis
The university began in the Middle Ages as an extension of Catholic monasticism, an intellectual world separate and apart from the practice of everyday life. In many ways, advanced scholarship retains something of its original monastic flavor. Academics are taught to keep a respectable distance from their subjects, to aim for objectivity, to cultivate detachment. But what are we missing when we constrain scholarship within these normative dimensions? What else might we learn—about the past, about others, about even ourselves—if we let down our guard and sidle up close to and alongside our subjects of study? In dialogue with her most recent work on Catholic narratives of sickness and disability in early modern French North America, Dunn articulates a vision for a more humane kind of scholarship beyond the ivory tower, a kind of scholarship that sits at the juncture of the personal and the professional, lived experience and archival record, scholarly practice and everyday life.
Mary Dunn is a historian of early modern Christianity. Her area of expertise is in the history of Catholicism in New France, that area of North America annexed to the French empire from the mid-sixteenth century to 1763. Within this area, she has published on female religious orders, motherhood, saints and sanctity, women's religious writing, the Jesuit Relations, and most recently sickness and disability. Her current book project treats the seventeenth-century Hôpital-Général in Quebec, a place of confinement for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the orphaned, and others operated by religious women. She is the author of From Mother to Son: Selected Letters from Marie de l'Incarnation to Claude Martin (Oxford, 2015), The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l'Incarnation, Motherhood, and the Christian Tradition (Fordham, 2016), Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Narratives of Sickness and Disability in Early Modern New France (forthcoming from Princeton University Press), and co-editor (with Brenna Moore) of Religious Intimacies (Indiana, 2020).
Free and open to the public. This will be an in-person presentation streamed live and video recorded. Please note that in person attendance is restricted to vaccinated Fordham community members; registration is required for all attendees. For more information, email cacs@fordham.edu.