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Jessica Delgado

Jessica Delgado is Assistant Professor of Religion at Princeton University since 2012. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of California at Berkeley and was Stewart Fellow in Religion at Princeton University from 2009-2012. Her field is the history of religion in Latin America with a focus on Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her research interests include women, gender, and sexuality; the Catholic Church in colonial society; race, caste, and religion; the materiality of devotion and the ways religiosity shapes peoples' experience of the physical world, including their own bodies; and the intersection between social and spiritual status in the early modern world. Her first book, Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain, 1630-1790, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and examines the ways laywomen’s religiosity and diverse but daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols, and ideas shaped the devotional culture and landscape of colonial Mexico. She has published essays on the subjects of laywomen’s use of ecclesiastical courts; spiritual status in New Spain; historical methodology; critical archive theory; and race and religion in colonial Latin American historiography. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, "The Beata of the Black Habit: Race, Religion, and Colonial Anxieties in the late 18th Century," as well as a number of individual and
collaborative projects related to the circulation and use of devotional objects, embodied and performed ritual, and hemispheric approaches to the history of religion.

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