People

2007-08 Research Associates and Visiting Faculty

J. Michelle Molina

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and History of Christianity

email: mmolina@hds.harvard.edu   phone: 617.384.8329

J. Michelle Molina is an assistant professor of trans-regional religion in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2004, where she studied religion and colonialism and, in particular, the history of colonial Latin America. Her research pertains to the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. She explores Jesuit spirituality in an effort to understand how individual Catholics—both elite and commoner, male and female—approached and experienced religious transformation. In particular, she has been interested in examining the impact of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises—a meditative retreat geared toward self-reform—on early modern global expansion. Specifically, she explores how the practice of meditative reading was a form of early modern Catholic agency.

At Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Molina will be continuing researching and writing a book manuscript that seeks to situate lay devotional practices as dynamic social forces. Her scholarship provides an analytical framework that illuminates the role of religious women's devotional labor in the history of early modern European expansion. She begins with the question: what was at stake in undertaking devotional practice? She then moves to consider devotional labor as an investment at the level of the "self," but emphasizes that at stake in undertaking Jesuit devotional methods was not only an increased intensity in one's relationship with the divine, but also an ordering of one's social reality through a rigorous ordering of time. Her investigation of early modern Catholic practices that linked formation of the "self" with outreach to the "other" contributes to an awareness of women's unique role in expanding and furthering the mission of the Jesuit order, which had such a profound influence on the shape of the early modern world.

Photograph courtesy Michelle Molina.