Join the Center for the Study of Religion for a colloquium celebrating the publication of Religion in the Americas: Trans-hemispheric and Transcultural Approaches, a new volume co-edited by CSR affiliate Jessica Delgado, associate professor in the departments of History of Art and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Jessica will be joined by her co-editor Christopher D. Tirres (Santa Clara University). They will offer insight about the volume and its genesis. OSU's Michelle Wibbelsman (Department of Spanish and Portuguese) and Alyssa Bedrosian (Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies) will also offer brief responses.
This event is free and open and welcoming to all. Co-hosted by the Humanities Institute.
Religion in the Américas explores the fluid, dynamic, and complex nature of religion across Latin America and its diasporic communities in the United States. Utilizing a transdisciplinary and trans-hemispheric lens, this groundbreaking anthology transcends traditional scholarly boundaries—geographical, disciplinary, and temporal—as it explores ideas and cultural practices that share a common history of Iberian colonialism.
This robust collection of essays forges a dialogue among scholars throughout the Americas who represent a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The book is divided into five sections: “Fluidity in the Afro-Latine Diaspora,” “Aesthetics in Las Américas,” “Critical Feminist Epistemologies and Activism,” “The Limits of Institutional Religion,” and “Spiritual Invasions and Contagions.” Throughout the volume, the concept of “experience” serves as a foundational lens, as chapters examine how individuals and communities actively interpret and negotiate their realities within diverse historical and social contexts.
Focusing on religion as a culturally conditioned epistemic practice, Religion in the Américas invites readers to engage with religion in the Americas on multiple, intersecting levels of knowledge, including local insights, scholarly analyses, and the positionality and queries of readers themselves. The book’s dialogical approach encourages not only continual reevaluation of the complexities of religious experience in the Americas but also creative innovation that will inspire new avenues of inquiry.
Jessica Delgado is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and History. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and taught at Princeton University in the religion Department from 2009-2019. Her primary areas of teaching and research are the histories of women, gender, sexuality, religion, and race in Latin America—particularly in Mexico in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Other areas of particular interest include: colonial Catholicism; gender, race, caste, and religion in the early modern Atlantic World; the materiality of devotion; the relationship between religiosity and people’s experiences of the physical world and embodiment; and the intersection between social and spiritual status. Her first book, Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico, 1630-1770, looks at the ways laywomen’s religiosity and daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols, and ideas shaped the devotional landscape of colonial Mexico. Her current book project is called The Beata of the Black Habit: Race, Sexuality, and Religious Authority in Late Colonial Mexico takes the life and trial of an unknown female mystic to explore changes in religious culture, colonial power, and racialized ideologies of gender and sexuality in late eighteenth-century Mexico.
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