Mary Dunn, Ph.D.
Professor
Theological Studies
Director
Center for Research on Global Catholicism
Office Hours
Tu: 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Courses Taught
Theories and Methods; Modern Seminar: Intimacies; Survey of Modern Christianity; Women in the Bible; Virgins, Martyrs, and Heretics; Theological Foundations; Mapping the Territory: Theory and Method in Theology and Religious Studies; Senior Research Seminar; Sensing Religion
Education
- B.A., Columbia University, 1998
- J.D., Harvard University, 2001
- M.T.S., Harvard University, 2002
- Ph.D., Harvard University, 2008
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
Publications and Media Placements
Books
- In Defense of Small Things: Love, History, and the Foundlings of Quebec's Hôtel-Dieu, in progress.
- Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds, Princeton University Press, 2022
- Objects and Archives in Global Catholic Cultures, edited with Anna Katharina Rudolph, forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press
- The Global Catholic Enlightenment: Balancing Church Authority and Modern Allegiances across Europe, the Americas, and Australia (1700–1840), edited with Shaun Blanchard, Rebecca Messbarger, and Jürgen Overhoff, forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press
- Religious Intimacies: Intersubjectivity in the Modern Christian West, edited with Brenna Moore, Indiana University Press, 2020
- “The Cruelest of All Mothers”: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and the Christian Tradition, Fordham University Press, 2016
- From Mother to Son: Selected Letters from Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin, Oxford University Press, 2014
Selected Essays
- “Vital Signs: Wonder, History, and the Catholic Imagination,” Catholic Historical Review (forthcoming).
- “Martyrdom, Rhetoric, and the Affective Remainder,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 11, no. 4 (November 2024): 606-623.
- “When Play Gets Serious: The Study of Religion Beyond the Limits of Critique,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 20 (2024): 1-14.
- "The Origin Myth of Religious Studies,” Body and Religion 6, no. 2 (2024): 255-259.
- “Sixteen and Possessed,” Spiritus: a Journal of Christian Spirituality 22, no, 2 (Fall 2022): 232-251.
- “Playing with Religion: Delight at the Border Between Epistemological Worlds,”Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, no. 4 (December 2021): 1208-1228.
- “The Impossible Irony of Vatican I," Harvard Theological Review 113, no. 1 (Jan. 2020): 138-145.
- “Bedside Manners: Sickness and the Jesuit Mission in Early Modern New France," Journal of Jesuit Studies 5, no. 4 (Nov. 2018): 567-585.
- “Rethinking Agency after the Relational Turn,” The Journal of Religion 97, no. 3 (July 2017): 345-359.
- “What Really Happened: Radical Empiricism and the Historian of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 4 (December 2016): 881-902.
- “Neither One Thing nor the Other: Discursive Polyvalence and Representations of Amerindian Women in the Jesuit Relations,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 3 (2016): 179-196.
- “But an Echo’?: Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Female Religious Identity in Seventeenth-Century New France,” The Catholic Historical Review 100, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 459-485.
- “Mysticism, Motherhood, and Pathological Narcissism? A Kohutian Analysis of Marie de l’Incarnation,” The Journal of Religion and Health 52, no. 2 (2013): 642-656.
- “‘The Cruelest of All Mothers’: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Discipleship,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (2012): 43-62.
- “When ‘Wolves Become Lambs’: Hybridity and the ‘Savage’ in the Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation,” The Seventeenth Century 27, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 104-120.
- “‘A Devotion Which… Distinguishes this People from all Others’: The Cult of Saint Anne and the Making of the Colonial Community in Seventeenth-Century New France,” Quebec Studies 51 (Spring/Summer 2011): 3-20.
- “The Miracles at Saint-Anne-du-Petit-Cap and Colonial Community Identity,” Canadian Historical Review 91.4 (December 2010): 611-635.
Honors and Awards
- American Academy of Religion Individual Research Grant, $2000; Summer 2024
- Mellon Faculty Development Grant, St. Louis University; Summer 2024
- American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion—Historical Studies for Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See, 2023
- Catholic Media Awards, first prize in History for Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See; 2023
- Big Idea Award, $779,914; 2023
- Scholarship Opportunity Fund Award, $5000; 2023
- NEH Summer Fellowship Nominee; 2022
- Big Idea Award, $19,000; 2021
- Beaumont Scholarship Research Award, $3748.56; 2021
- Stolle Fund Award, $1900; 2021
- Research Growth Fund Award, $28,000; 2019
- John Foley Conference Competition, $30,000; 2018
- Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award Nominee, 2018
Professional Organizations and Associations
- American Academy of Religion
- American Catholic Historical Association