2006 Annual Seminar
The Transit of Christianity, 1500-1825
Tuesday, August 1
Session 1: The Power of Prelates
Chair: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas, Austin
Scott Sessions, Princeton University / Amherst College, “Evangelization and Reform in the Early Modern Atlantic World: The Impact and Legacy of Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros”
Emily Berquist, University of Texas, Austin, “Bishop Martínez Compañón’s Living Laboratory of Enlightenment in Trujillo, Peru”
Session 2: Atlantic Transfers
Chair: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas, Austin
Chair: Erik R. Seeman, University at Buffalo – SUNY
Ryan Dominic Crewe, Yale University, “An Atlantic of New Christians: The Politics of Conversion in the Canaries, Granada, and Mexico, 1470–1540”
Nicholas Beasley, Vanderbilt University / Emory University, “‘Death is more busy in this Place’: Mortuary Ritual in the British Plantation Colonies, 1640-1780”
Wednesday, August 2
Session 3: Shipboard Conversions
Chair: Jon Butler, Yale University
Stephen R. Berry, Duke University, “Consecrating the Atlantic: Christian Approaches to Ship Life in the Eighteenth Century”
Heidi Keller-Lapp, University of California, San Diego, “Maritime Habits: Ursuline Atlantic Voyages to the New World, 1639-1727”
Thursday, August 3
Session 4: The Non-Church Militant
Chair: Mary Maples Dunn, American Philosophical Society
Sarah Crabtree, University of Minnesota, “Lamb-Like Warriors: A Nation of God and the Quakers’ Church Militant”
Jonathan Beecher Field, Clemson University, “Suffering and Subscribing: Configurations of Authorship in the Quaker Atlantic”
Session 5: Backcountry Radicalism
Chair: A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University
Peter N. Moore, Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, “Religious Radicalism in the Colonial Southern Backcountry”
Alexander Pyrges, Universität Trier, “Communicating and Symbolizing Space: The Ebenezer Communication Network and the Religious Integration of the North Atlantic World”
Friday, August 4
Session 6: The Atlantic and a Wider World
Chair: Gabriel Martínez-Serna, Southern Methodist University
Karen Melvin, Bates College, “Global Family Ties: New Spain’s Mendicant Orders and Their Institutes”
Karin Vélez, Princeton University / Williams College, “Loreto’s ‘Holy House’ in the Americas, 1670-1720: The Jesuit Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot’s Canadian Replica Chapel in Transatlantic Context”
Session 7: Religious Orders: Jesuits and Franciscans
Chair: Gabriel Martínez-Serna, Southern Methodist University
J. Michelle Molina, University of California, Irvine, “‘The Help of Souls’: Evangelization, Consolation, and the Will to Self-Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century New Spain”
Kazuhisa Takeda, Sophia University, Tokyo, “Preaching the Gospel on a Global Scale: A Study of the Spanish Roots of the Missionary Spirit in the New World”
Saturday, August 5
Session 8: Catholics in a Protestant World
Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Owen Stanwood, Catholic University of America, “The Popish Plot in America: International Protestantism and the Origins of Empire, 1678-1690”
Christa Beranek, Boston University, “Personal Devotions, Atlantic Contexts: Catholic Religious Artifacts from Seventeenth-Century St. Mary’s City, Maryland”
Monday, August 7
Session 9: Symbolic Systems
Chair: David Tavárez, Vassar College
Claudia Brosseder, Stanford University, “‘Magic between Two Worlds’: Sorcerers, Toads, and the Transit of the Christian Super- and Preternatural into Colonial Peru”
Sarah Rivett, Washington University, St. Louis, “Christian Translations: Indian Grammar and the Quest for a Universal Language in the British Atlantic World”
Session 10: Adaptations
Chair: David Tavárez, Vassar College
Chair: Allan Greer, University of Toronto
Jonathan Truitt, Tulane University, “Sights, Sounds, and Spirituality: Confraternities of San Josef de los Naturales, 1524-1700”
Christopher Bilodeau, Dickinson College, “Catholic Ritual and Hierarchy among the Wabanaki Indians, 1675-1725”
Tuesday, August 8
Session 11: African Dimensions
Chair: John Thornton, Boston University
Cécile Fromont, Harvard University, “Capuchin Missionary Methods and the Shaping of Christianity in Early Modern Kongo”
Christa Dierksheide, University of Virginia, “Capable of Improvement”: Commerce, Christianity, and the Idea of an Independent Africa, c. 1740-1810”
Wednesday, August 9
Session 12: Caribbean Crucible
Chair: Hilary Beckles, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Kristen Block, Rutgers University, “‘Pirates,’ Patrons, and the Performance of Catholic Conversion in Spanish Caribbean Ports, 1610-1660”
Jenny Shaw, New York University / John Carter Brown Library, “‘All the Bibles burnt & all the protestants hanged or killed’: Irish Religious Practices in an English Atlantic World, 1650-1692”
Session 13: Revolutionary Transformations: Argentina
Chair: Jaime E. Rodríguez, University of California, Irvine
Jorge Troisi-Melean, Emory University, “Old World New Ideas and Latin American Realities: Some Notes on the Impact of Liberal Reforms on the Argentine Franciscans of Córdoba, 1780-1830”
Ignacio Martínez, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina, “From Madrid to Rome: The Dismantling of Colonial Ecclesiastical Jurisdictions in the Río de la Plata and Alternatives for Their Reconstruction, 1810-1825”
Thursday, August 10
Session 14: Concluding Session