Northwestern University
Candidate for Executive Council (2025-27)
Candidate statement
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, where I teach classes on colonial Mexico, transatlantic cultural and religious connections, and theoretical approaches to the study of embodiment and materiality.
In my research, I have been particularly interested in Jesuit spirituality in an effort to understand how individuals – both elite and commoner — approached and experienced religious transformation. In my first book, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion (California, 2013), I explored the impact of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises – a meditative retreat geared toward self-reform – on early modern global expansion. Having studied Jesuit global expansion, I next turned my attention to a period of “contraction” for Catholic missionary evangelicalism. My second book (under review with Fordham University Press) tells the story of the arrest of the Jesuits of the Mexican Province, their expulsion, and the lives they lived in exile in the Italian Papal States. To tell this story, I have studied three kinds of inventories. The first are the lists of books and objects that the Jesuits were compelled to leave behind after their arrest. The second inventory is the accounting of self that shapes the conversion narrative of a young Swedish Lutheran who, boarded a ship to Corsica in 1769 and found as his travelling companions 200 Mexican Jesuits recently expelled from the Americas. In close confines with these members of the Society of Jesus for the duration of his five-week journey, Thjülen chose to convert to Catholicism and, shortly after arriving in Italy, he became a Jesuit. The third inventory is the collection of “memorias” or obituaries of dead Jesuits from the Mexican Province, composed by José Felix de Sebastián from the moment of the arrest in 1767 until 1796. The title of this book is “Inventories of Ruin: The Demise of the Mexican Jesuits, in Three Acts.”
I would be excited to bring my scholarly interests in global Catholicism to my service on the Executive Committee of the ACHA. I would also bring to the committee a variety of administrative experiences, including my current service as a member of the Catholic Studies Steering Committee for the American Academy of Religion.