Robert Orsi

Professor of Religion
Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies
Department of Religious Studies
Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 4-139
Phone: (847) 467-5175
E-Mail: r-orsi@northwestern.edu
Office Hours: Mondays 1-3pm (Winter 2012)

Robert Orsi is the first holder of the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies. Before coming to Northwestern, he taught at Fordham University at Lincoln Center from 1981 to 1988; Indiana University from 1988 to 2001; and Harvard Divinity School and Harvard University from 2001 to 2007, where he was Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (2003-2007). In 2002-2003, he was president of the American Academy of Religion. Professor Orsi studies America religious history and contemporary practice; American Catholicism in both historical and ethnographic perspective; and he is widely recognized also for his work on theory and method for the study of religion.

His first book, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (Yale, 1985, 3rd ed. 2010), received the John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association and the Jesuit National Book Award. This was followed by Thank You, Saint Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (Yale, 1996), which won the Merle Curti Award in American Social History from the Organization of American Historians. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, 2004) received an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion and was one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2005. He edited Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Indiana, 1999).

Professor Orsi has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 he received the E. Leroy Hall Award for Teaching Excellence, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, the highest recognition for teaching offered by WCAS.

Professor Orsi has just published The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (2012). Other recent projects include “U.S - Catholics Between Memory and Modernity: How Catholics Are American,” forthcoming in R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings, eds., Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History (Cornell University Press, 2012); “My Specific Form of Disorientation,” forthcoming in Titus Hjelm and Phil Zuckerman, eds., Studying Religion and Society (Routledge, 2012); and “Everyday Religion and the Contemporary World: The Un-Modern, Or What Was Supposed to Have Disappeared But Did Not,” in Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec, eds., Everyday Religion (forthcoming, Berghan, 2012). With Professors Timothy Matovina and Kathleen Sprows Cummings of Notre Dame, Professor Orsi has organized a multi-year interdisciplinary project on the “lived history of the Second Vatican Council” involving scholars from around the world.

Professor Orsi is currently at work on a collection of theoretical and methodological essays, tentatively titled Abundant History, and on a social and cultural history of 20th-century Catholic childhoods in the United States, to be published by Harvard University Press.

Selected Works

Books

Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Robert A. Orsi. Princeton, 2004.

Divine Mirrors: The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts. Melissa R. Katz and Robert A. Orsi. Oxford, 2001.

Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape Robert A. Orsi, ed. Indiana, 1999.

The Modanna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem. Robert A. Orsi. Yale, 1985.

Thank You, St. Jude: Women`s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. Robert A. Orsi. Yale, 1998.