University of Notre Dame
Candidate for Executive Council (2026-28)
Candidate statement
I am an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, where I teach classes on the history of Catholicism, modern France, and European thought. I am an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe, with a particular interest in the history of Catholic thought and the relationship between religion and politics.
My first book, Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), received the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies, as well as prizes from the European Academy of Religion, the College Theology Society, and the Catholic Media Association. The book examines the impact of Catholic theology on French politics after the separation of Church and state in 1905, showing how the continuing role of theology in an ostensibly secular public sphere disrupts prevailing ideas about the nature and scope of the political in the modern world. I’m now at work on a second book, tentatively called Planetary Catholicism. It explores how Catholics have imagined the global as a theological, ecological, and political problem since the Second World War, and asks how these religious visions have interacted with secular forms of global consciousness rooted in international law, science, politics, and the economy.
In addition to these projects, I have co-edited a volume of essays titled Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and my work has appeared in Past & Present, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Boston Review, Commonweal, and The Immanent Frame.
I would be honored to serve on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association. My involvement with the organization dates back to 2012, when I first presented a paper at the annual meeting as a graduate student. My service to the ACHA would be informed by my current research interest in global Catholicism. I hope to build on recent initiatives at the ACHA to promote the study of global Catholicism, by helping to forge stronger connections between American and non-American scholars of Catholicism. Because my scholarship lies at the intersection between history, theology, and political theory, I would also work to promote conversations across disciplines. To the role, I would bring administrative experience at three universities. I have organized several international conferences on the history of religion, co-founded the Transnational France research cluster—an interdisciplinary hub for scholars across the University of Notre Dame who study France and the Francophone world—and I currently serve on the academic advisory board for Catholic Re-Visions.