The American Catholic Historical Association’s annual elections are being held online through September 29. To vote, please visit our secure voting Web site.

To cast your ballot, you will need your balloting user name and password. This information was sent to all members in an e-mail dated September 14. Please check your e-mail for this information. If you need assistance, please contact [email protected].

 

Candidates for Office

Click on a name or office for candiate-provided responses and CVs.

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Vice President (vote one)

• Daniel Bornstein, Washington University, St. Louis
• Roy Domenico, University of Scranton

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Executive Council, 2013-2016 (two seats)

SEAT A – Vote one:

• Catherine Higgs, University of Tennessee
• Anthony Burke Smith, University of Dayton

SEAT B – Vote one:

• Charles J.T. Talar, St. Mary’s Seminary and University, Baltimore
• Stefania Tutino, University of California, Santa Barbara

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Vice Presidential candidates

Daniel Bornstein (Washington University, St. Louis)

Over the past few years, the ACHA has successfully negotiated a challenging period of transition. We now have in place a new constitution and by-laws, a new executive secretary, a new web site, and new grants to support the work of our members. Our task for the coming years is to consolidate those achievements, to ensure that the ACHA maintains its commitment to fostering the finest scholarship, and to see that it continues to welcome all those who share an interest in the history of the Catholic Church. For the ACHA to enjoy a robust future, we must broaden our membership and engage members in the intellectual life of the association, so that our annual meetings will continue to be occasions for lively dialog and the Catholic Historical Review will continue to attract and publish the finest and most innovative work in the field. We must reach out to younger scholars who are struggling to establish themselves in this period of retrenchment, to historians who work outside of traditional academic departments, and to colleagues from around the world who study the history of the Catholic Church in its manifold aspects – social, intellectual, and cultural, as well as theological and institutional.

I bring to these tasks broad experience in both public and private institutions of higher education around the country and a long record of active involvement in professional associations. I studied at Oberlin College and the University of Chicago, and taught at the University of Michigan, the University of California at San Diego, and Texas A&M University before joining the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. I have served on the Membership Committee of the American Society of Church History and, for nine years, its Research Committee, the last three of those as chair. I served for five years on the advisory council of the Society for Italian Historical Studies and for three years (2006-2009) as an elected member of the Executive Council of the ACHA. During my term on the Council, I hosted the meeting during which we revised the constitution and by-laws. Internationally, I have taught in Milan and Budapest and lectured in China, and am currently a member of the editorial boards of the journals Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo and Medievalia et Humanistica and of the book series Toscana Sacra.

• Daniel Bornstein’s CV [PDF]

Roy Domenico (University of Scranton)

I served on the Executive Council of the ACHA during a very volatile period of its history. To that difficult situation I brought good humor and a sincere effort to appreciate arguments on all sides. Transitioning now into its new form, the Association needs an experienced hand to facilitate that journey. We need to continue our transformation, strengthened by increased membership and by more active involvement from graduate students and younger scholars. And we need to cultivate the ACHA as a “user-friendly” organization for all of its members and for those who are thinking of joining. Along with my participation on the Executive Council, I offer the ACHA knowledge gained from my current work as Department Chair at the University of Scranton (where I directed the Association’s 2003 spring meeting), as President of the Society for Italian Historical Studies (2006-2007) and as co-president of the Missouri Conference on History (1996-1997). I have reached the writing stage of my next “big” project, “The Devil and the Dolce Vita: Cultural Politics and Catholic Efforts to Save Italy’s Soul, 1948-1974;” and I continue to explore in various other ways the history of Catholic politics.

• Roy Domenico’s CV [PDF]

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Executive Council – Seat A

Catherine Higgs (University of Tennessee)

The ACHA has worked over the last several years to strengthen its ties to international Catholic organizations. Africa; however, remains underrepresented both in scholarship and outreach. It is by expanding the ACHA’s connections to Africa that I would like to contribute to the association’s growing interests in global Catholicism. Questions of diversity have informed my career from its very beginning. I am vice chair of Africana Studies at the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and have served in a variety of administrative positions, including as Director of Graduate Studies in History. I have traveled extensively in Africa (and in Europe), speak French and Portuguese, and have written about politics, race, gender, and religious beliefs. My current research project, Sisters for Justice: Religion and Political Transformation in Apartheid South Africa (for which I conducted ninety oral history interviews and did research in a dozen private and public archives), explores the activism of Catholic sisters who helped crack the façade of the apartheid state by opening their schools to children of all races in direct contravention of segregationist laws. Cultivating these contacts —personal, scholarly, and archival—acquired over twenty-five years of traveling to Africa, offers the potential to further enhance the ACHA’s presence, and broaden its opportunities for collaboration, particularly in southern Africa.

• Catherine Higgs’ CV [PDF]

Anthony Burke Smith (University of Dayton)

The website of the American Catholic Historical Association states that the organization is “the place where the field of Catholic studies begins.” I would like to serve on the Executive Council of the ACHA because I am committed to advancing that vision of the organization as a leading academic force in the historical study of Catholicism. I believe my background, research and experience make me well suited to the Executive Council. I am an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton. I received my Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, 1995. My research and writing examines the relationships between Catholics and 20th-century American culture, particularly the interpenetration of Catholicism and popular culture since the 1920s. I am the author of The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University Press of Kansas, 2010) and a number of articles and chapters investigating Catholics in American mass media. In addition to my scholarship, I believe my administrative experience as the Director of Graduate Studies in my department at UD provides me with important qualifications to serve on the Executive Council. I’ve worked with many Ph.D. and M.A. students as both academic advisor for their coursework and research and a person who facilitated their introduction to graduate studies.

Given my background and research I am particularly interested in supporting interdisciplinary approaches to Catholic studies not only in an American context, but in whatever context Catholicism is examined. Towards that end, I would like to encourage dialogue with scholars in other fields such as Religious Studies and American Studies whose interests overlap with Catholic studies. I am also interested in promoting and developing graduate student interest in the field of Catholic studies. I view the ACHA blog and the research grants for graduate students as examples of the kind of exciting initiatives that are needed to engage young scholars in Catholic history. Reaching out and supporting the next generation of scholars in the historical study of Catholicism is vital for ensuring that the ACHA remains the place where Catholic studies not only begins but where it thrives.

• Anthony Burke Smith’s CV [PDF]

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Executive Council – Seat B

Charles J.T. Talar (St. Mary’s Seminary and University, Baltimore)

Qualifications: I’ve been a member of the ACHA since the early 1990s. Regular involvement in the American Academy of Religion with the R.C. Modernism Seminar (co-convener 1995 – 1999) and the Nineteenth-Century Theology Group (Steering Committee member, multiple terms) has meant that attendance/presentation at ACHA meetings has been more occasional. (The practice of effectively having to propose a session of papers has also restricted participation as a presenter.)

Over the years I’ve done a number of book reviews for CHR and been a peer reviewer for articles.

For three years I served the association as a member of the Gilmary Shea Prize committee.

Administratively, in addition to the AAR involvements noted, I’ve been Vice President of the Société Internationale d’Études sur Alfred Loisy. In these capacities I’ve worked collaboratively with colleagues.

The Association: The Association has over the years performed a real service with the CHR, expanding readers’ historical horizons beyond their own specializations and evaluating books in specific areas of interest.

The meetings have provided opportunities for doing much the same—in my earlier years of attendance I was more the recipient of accumulated wisdom from others; more recently I’ve on occasion been able to impart some of my own. Networking is an obvious benefit. Beyond the obvious, for one such as myself who teaches mainly in theology, but whose research is mainly historical, it has been an important resource.

Lastly, the ACHA functions, in my experience, as a venue that is hospitable to younger scholars making their way in the profession.

If I may contribute in a modest way to advancing these functions by serving on the Executive Council, I would like to do so as a form of return for what I and others have received over time.

• Charles J.T. Talar’s CV [PDF]

Stefania Tutino (University of California, Santa Barbara )

As a relatively young scholar, and as somebody who has been educated in Europe but who has lived and worked in the United States for almost a decade now, I see myself as the expression of a new generation of historians of Catholicism. The history of Catholicism, as I see it, is now more than ever a vibrant and exciting field of studies. To study the history of Catholicism means to reckon with a rich and important scholarly tradition; at the same time, however, historians of Catholicism, because of the complex and multifaceted nature of their object of study, are perfectly suited to confront new methodological challenges, and to integrate the social, intellectual, political, and cultural dimensions into the historical development of a fundamental Western religious tradition which nevertheless is, and has always been, in constant dialectic with non-Western cultures. In this respect, I think that the history of Catholicism is, and must remain, crucial for understanding not simply the past, but also the future of this complex and increasingly globalized religion.

• Stefania Tutino CV [PDF]