2007-08 Research Associates
and Visiting Faculty
Joan Branham (Providence College)
Ritual, Gender, and Space in the Jerusalem Temple, Ancient
Synagogues, and Early Churches
This project examines late-antique Jewish and Christian strategies
to contend with the Jerusalem Temple tradition, including its gendered
and spatial constructions. The literary and material mapping of temple
space onto early churches and synagogues—and even onto ritualized
bodies operating within them—reveals a variety of rhetorical and
iconographical endeavors to reject, reinterpret, and appropriate the
powerful influence of the Jerusalem forerunner. (Early Christianity and Judaism)
Ronit Irshai
(Bar-Ilan University)
Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Halakhah
This project aims to develop a blueprint for a feminist approach to the
philosophy of Jewish law (halakhah) and to exemplify its
application through examination of the representative issue of "human
dignity" as this impacts on the social and ritual role of women in
Judaism. (Judaism)
Monica Maher (Union Theological Seminary)
Colorado Scholar
Faith and Feminicide in Latin America
This project will analyze the ways symbolic structures grounded in
religious/moral discourses function to legitimize, even facilitate,
feminicide in Latin America. The research will focus on the myths which
faith-based women's groups identify as key religious meta-narratives
that sustain the current sex/gender hierarchy and the directions Latin
American women are taking to reconstruct a paradigm of women's
religious/political empowerment. (Ethics)
J. Michelle Molina
(University of California, Irvine)
The Jesuit Ethic: The Spirit and Gender of Global Expansion
This research utilizes a revised notion of spiritual "agency" in an
effort to unearth evidence of the contribution of women's devotional
labor in the history of early modern global expansion. Focusing on the
Jesuit "Spiritual Exercises," it explores how women's meditation and
prayer had profound global consequences for Jesuit social and economic
institutions, and also shaped what have been considered "Jesuit"
devotional practices. (History of Christianity)
Miryam Segal
(Indiana University)
Women and Religion in Hebrew Poetry
"Women" and "Judaism" are categories fraught with anxiety and
ambivalence in modern Hebrew culture. This project is about Hebrew and
Israeli poetry by women and the ways it has challenged and/or conformed
to accepted notions of the nation's relationship to religion and to
women as symbols, as laborers, as artists. The focus is on the poets'
literary and political uses of the Bible, Christian saints' lives, and
Jewish legal and mystical traditions. (Judaism)
2007-08 Woodrow Wilson Visiting Scholar
Sue E. Houchins
(Bates College)
Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo
Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo (Chicaba)—an African nun who lived in a
Spanish convent during the first half of the eighteenth century—is the
subject of a biography by a Spanish priest who made extensive use of her
autobiographical writings and poetry. This project treats that biography
as a hybrid genre, part hagiography and part as-told-to (auto-)
biography, to discern where Chicaba's unique worldview and radical
intent peek through the surface of her biographer's prose, exhibiting
its dual origins, African and European. (African and African American Studies)
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