MAVCOR celebrates the achievements of our Material Economies of Religion (MERA) fellows.
Alexia Williams and Judith Brunton were awarded Louisville Institute Dissertation Fellowships.
Maya Berry was awarded the 2019 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Workshop Grant for her project "Gender Violence and the Politics of Research."
Judith Weisenfeld was elected to the Society of American Historians. She also joined the Sacred Writes Leadership Team.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson was awarded a Paul Mellon Center Fellowship for her project "Infectious Intimacies."
Sonia Hazard joins the Religion Department of Florida State University as Assistant Professor of American Religious History.
Alex Kaloyanides and Kati Curts organized a special MERA roundtable and pop-up exhibit for the 2019 American Academy of Religion (AAR) meeting titled "#CaptioningReligion: Characterizing the Material Economies of Religion in the Americas." The roundtable and exhibit includes contributions by the following MERA fellows: Sally Promey, Chip Callahan, Kathryn Lofton, Suzanne van Geuns, Roxanne Korpan, Sonia Hazard, Judith Brunton, David Walker, Tracy Fessenden, Hillary Kaell, and Pamela Klassen.
In November 2018, a show of the photographs of the Mexican photographer Fernando Brito opened at Fordham¹s International Institute for Humanitarian Affairs gallery. MERA fellow Didier Aubert organized the show; MERA fellow Barbara Mundy was the on-site curator. Mundy also oversaw the publication of a catalog of the show, with short essays by Aubert, Mundy, and MERA fellow Laura Worden. The catalog was supported by MERA funds available for such uses in the generous grant to MERA from the Henry Luce Foundation. Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) provided additional support.
In fall of 2019, Laura Worden will install the show of Brito’s photographs at Yale.
Ellen Amster organized a seven-day research meeting and conference in Morocco for the Morocco-Canada Maternal and Infant Health Network. The meeting brought together 18 collaborators from 3 countries and was financed by grant funding from the Canadian Institute for Health Research and from Associated Medical Services.
In spring 2019, Barbara Mundy taught an advanced undergraduate course, Modern Latin American Art, at Fordham. As part of Mundy’s activity as a MERA fellow, she developed a semester-long research project with students in that class, Moving Saints of the Bronx. Her students did primary research on the local devotional practices among Latin American immigrant communities in the Bronx, and created a website where they documented what they found, and curated exhibits based on research projects that grew out of that data. MERA fellow Gabriella Costa is collaborating with Mundy on the Moving Saints project.
Hillary Kaell is co-organizer (with Jeremy Stolow and Nicola Pezolet) of the Material Religion Initiative, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University, 2018-2019.
Kaell is also Project director (with Susan Palmer), of the on-going World Religions and Spirituality Project, an online database of profiles for the Canadian Religious and Spiritual Traditions section.
Emily Floyd joined the faculty of History of Art at University College London as Lecturer of Visual Culture and Art before 1700. She was also awarded a 2019-2020 Thoma Foundation Research and Travel Award for Spanish Colonial Art.
Greg Johnson has been appointed Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His term as Director will begin in January of 2020.
Jessica Delgado received tenure and will move to Ohio State University as Associate Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Dana Leibsohn (with Aaron Hyman) was awarded a 2018 Association of Print Scholars publication grant for their project "Washing the Archive: Indigenous Knowledge, European Prints, and Colonial Histories of Latin America."
Ambre Dromgoole received funding from the Franke Program in Science and Humanities, the Center for Race Indigeneity and Transnational Migration, the MacMillan Center, and the Taylor Fund in African American Studies to continue research on 20th century gospel composer Roxie Ann Moore.
Suzanne van Geuns received a Mitacs Globalink Research Award to spend a semester at the Oxford Internet Institute. She also received a Mary H. Beatty Fellowship.
We recognize the following MERA Fellow publications:
Jessica Delgado, Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain, 1630–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Cécile Fromont, ed. Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State University Press, 2019).
Hillary Kaell, "Worshipping in Concert with the World," Invited Essay, Journal of Modern American History, 1(2) 2018: 277-282.
Suzanne van Geuns, "Reading, feeling, believing: online testimonies and the making of Evangelical emotion," Journal of Contemporary Religion 34, no. 1 (2019): doi:10.1080/13537903.2019.1585122
Meredith Gamer, "Scalpel to Burin: A Material History of William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus." In William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum, edited by Mungo Campbell and Nathan Flis, 108-125. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Maya Berry, with Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada, and Claudia Chávez Argüelles, "Reflections on the Limitations and Liberatory Potential of Feminist Anthropology (Part Two)." Anthropology News website, May 24, 2018: e174-e177. doi:10.1111/AN.1061
_______. "La movilización del tema afrodescendiente en la Habana, 2012-2014: un estudio de las posibilidades del performance," Cuban Studies Journal 48 (June 2019): 276-302.
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/726370
Emily Floyd, "Grabadores-plateros en el virreinato peruano." In Plata de los Andes, edited by Ricardo Kusunoki Rodríguez and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, 84-97. Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2018.
Emily Floyd and Sally Promey, "Collaborative scholarly communities and access in the study of material and visual cultures of religion." In "Digital Scholarship in the Critical Study of Religion." Edited by James Bielo, special issue. Religion 48, no. 2 (2018): 262-275, doi:10.1080/0048721X.2018.1445603
Marci Kwon contributed an essay on Isamu Noguchi, Appalachian Spring, and Japanese internment in Modernism/modernity’s new cluster on "Modernist Setting"
https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/modernist-setting @MModernity
Several MERA fellows contributed to the Immanent Frame’s project #IsThisAllThereIs:
Kathryn Lofton, "This is Not Fine"
Tracy Fessenden, "The lady is unvanquished"
Sonia Hazard, "Do my socks respond to my caress?"
David Walker, "The End of the Circus"
Kati Curts, "Spiral glimpses"
Pamela E. Klassen, "Epic Lives"
Paul Christopher Johnson, "Democracity, 2042"
Lerone Martin, "The FBI"
Hillary Kaell, "On the power of aggregates"
Sally Promey, "Testimonial aesthetics and public display"