Richard T. Yoder, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Penn State University, has been awarded the John Tracy Ellis Award for his dissertation-in-progress, “Unorthodox Flesh: Gender, Religious Convulsions, and Charismatic Knowledge in Early Modern France,” a queer analysis of the convulsionnaires of the eighteenth century. The dissertation focuses on issues of gender, knowledge, and the supernatural in early modern Catholicism, with an emphasis on the French Jansenists.
The Ellis Award is awarded annually to a doctoral student in the field of Catholic Studieswith a promising, but not-yet-completed dissertation.
Yoder has been a member of ACHA since 2019, and last year received the Peter Guilday Prize for his article, “From the Dove to the Eagle: Jansenist Visual Culture Between Piety and Polemic,” published in the Autumn 2021 issue of the Catholic Historical Review. His d