Leadership &
Executive Council
ACHA Officers and Executive Council Members
Saint Louis University
- Research Interests: History of Early Modern Christianity, Saints and Sanctity, Catholicism in France and New France, Theory and Method in Religious Studies, Sickness and disability, motherhood studies
University of Illinois Chicago
President (2026)
Ralph Keen, professor of history is a historian of early modern Europe, specifically the Protestant Reformation and Early Modern Catholicism, and even more specifically the ways those movements appropriated the classical and patristic traditions. His work has appeared in Martin Luther in Context (Cambridge 2018), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther (2017), Harvard Theological Review (2017), and elsewhere, and he is an editor of the monograph series Catholic Christendom 1300-1700, published by Brill.
Professor Keen has authored two books, including Divine and Human Authority in Reformation Thought and Exile and Restoration in Jewish Thought, as well as a textbook from Prentice Hall entitled, The Christian Tradition. He has also edited or compiled nine other books and written dozens of articles for a variety of books and journals.
Keen received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1990 and an MA in Classics from Yale in 1980.
University of Dayton
- Notable Publications:
The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010.
Mount St. Mary’s University
- Research Interests: U.S. in the World, U.S. Religious History, History of Built Environment, Global Catholicism, Southern Africa
- Notable Publications:
“Missionary Empire: American Catholics in Belize and Guatemala, 1941-1961,” American Catholic Studies Vol. 130, No. 3, (Fall 2019); “’Quest for the Holy Grail’: Central American War, Catholic Internationalism, and United States Public Diplomacy in Reagan’s America,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 33, no. 1 (Winter 2015), 163-197; “God Save the Boer: Irish American Catholics and the South African War, 1899-1902,” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 26, no. 4 (Fall 2008), 1-26.
Pepperdine University
Notable Publications:
- “‘Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart Will Prevail’: Vietnamese Marianism and Anticommunism, 1940–1975,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 17.2–3 (2022): 126–157.
- “The Resettlement of Vietnamese Refugee Religious, Priests, and Seminarians in the United States, 1975–1977,” U.S. Catholic Historian 37.3 (2019): 99–122.
University of Maryland
Executive Council, 2023-25
Research Interests:
Religion and Literature, Critical and Post-critical Theories, 20th Century Latin, American Literature, Southern Cone Literatures, Modernismo and Avant-garde, Periodical publications, First Wave Feminism, Latin American and Latinx Religions
St. Norbert College
Research Interests:
- American Catholic history, sacred space, and the Virgin Mary
Notable Publications:
American Patroness: Marian Shrines and the Making of US Catholicism, co-edited with Katherine Dugan, Ph.D., Fordham University Press (forthcoming, 2023)
Archives of the Archdiocese of New York
Thomas Worcester
Fordham University
Roy Domenico
Fordham University
Research interests: 19th- and 20th-century European political and cultural history, Italy
J. Michelle Molina
Northwestern University
Research interests: Trans-regional Religious History, Jesuits, Gender and Subjectivity, Early Modern Europe and Colonial Latin America
Dennis Wieboldt
University of Notre Dame
Dennis Wieboldt is a J.D./Ph.D. student in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a Richard and Peggy Notebaert Premier Fellow at the Graduate School and Edward J. Murphy Fellow at the Law School. His research explores the relationship between law, politics, and religion in the twentieth-century United States.
Catholic Historical Review
Ex officio
Nelson H. Minnich is the editor of the Catholic Historical Review and a professor of history at the Catholic University of America. His work has dealt broadly with Christian humanism, the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, and the papacy and general councils of the early modern period, especially the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-17).
Under ACHA bylaw, the editor of the CHR, which is the official organ of the Association, holds an ex officio seat on the Executive Council “with voice but without vote.”