Michelle Molina

The John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies
Department of Religious Studies
Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 4-142
Phone: 847- 491-2620
E-Mail: molina@northwestern.edu

Office Hours: Appointment Only (Spring 2011)

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. She is bringing a book manuscript to completion that 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.

She is developing a new research project that asks, how did it become possible to see bodies in parts? How did new ideas about human anatomy circulate, outside of philosophic treatises, even outside of the literate world? One is a question about the formation of ideas; the other about their circulation. She contend that addressing both concerns is possible through a study of early modern Catholic devotional literature and devotional practices and begins by examining eighteenth-century transformations in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus to argue that the distinctive shape of the anatomically-correct heart offers a concrete sense of this historical moment when spiritual contemplation and observation of natural phenomena converged. From there, she moves to consider the shift from "heart" to "mind" as the seat of human subjectivity and the target of various programs for human transformation that included spiritual, moral and/or psychological therapeutics.

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.

History of Christianity in early modern Europe and Latin America, with emphasis on the Society of Jesus and colonial Mexico, early modern natural and moral philosophy. Interested in the space where critical theory meets social science.

Selected Works

Books

Co-edited with Donald Swearer, Rethinking the Human (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Articles

• "An Ambivalent Philosophy of the Concrete," in Rethinking the Human (HUP, 2010)
• Co-authored with Ulrike Strasser, "The Global Currency of Female Sanctity: A Seventeenth-Century Mexican Mystic and her Jesuit Biographers from the Spanish and German Empires," Women, Religion and the Atlantic World, 1600-1800, eds. Danna Kostroum and Lisa Vollendorf (University of Toronto Press, 2009)
• "Technologies of the Self: The Letters of Eighteenth-Century Mexican Jesuit Spiritual Daughters," History of Religions (May 2008)
• "True Lies: Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata and the Life Story of a Mexican Mystic," Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen, (New York: Routledge, 2004).
• "Spirituality and Colonial Governmentality: The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises in Europe and Abroad," Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, eds. Patricia Ingham and Michelle Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).