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
Labs and Facilities
Professor Dunn's
Publications and Media Placements
Books
The Enfants Trouvés of Quebec: 1800-1845, in progress.
, Princeton University Press, 2022
, edited with Brenna Moore, Indiana University Press, 2020
, Fordham University Press, 2016.
, Oxford University Press, 2014
Selected Essays
“The Origin Myth of Religious Studies,” Body and Religion, forthcoming.
“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
- Faculty Research Leave; Mellon Faculty Development Grant;
- Presidential Fellowship (Harvard University); Phi Beta Kappa.
- 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