J. Michelle Molina

John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies

Department of Religious Studies
Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 4-142
Phone: (847) 461-2620
E-Mail: molina@northwestern.edu

J. Michelle Molina (PhD, University of Chicago, 2004) studies the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. She explores Jesuit spirituality in an effort to understand how individuals – both elite and commoner -- approached and experienced religious transformation. In particular, she has been interested in examining the impact of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises – a meditative retreat geared toward self-reform – on early modern global expansion. Accordingly, her book manuscript is tentatively titled The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion. The book examines the method and purpose of the Exercises, the role of women’s spiritual activism in popularizing the Exercises among the laity and the impact that this Jesuit program of radical self-reflexivity had on the formation of colonial selves.

More broadly, the courses she teaches examine how the Christian notions of “self” that various colonial powers carried with them throughout approximately five-hundred years of European expansion impacted the world view of colonial subjects and reshaped the ground for both self-understanding, acculturation and conflict. Her courses attempt to encompass aspects of the history of early modern Europe and colonial Latin America within the same analytical framework, drawing upon insights from postcolonial theory and recent work in Atlantic history.

Fields of interest:

Trans-regional religious history, Jesuits, gender and subjectivity, early modern Europe and colonial Latin America

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