CRGC to Host Conference on Global Catholicism and Material Culture
09/29/2023
The Center for Research on Global Catholicism will convene scholars from around the world for a conference on global Catholicism and material culture at SLU.
The conference, entitled “Translations, Transgressions, and Transformations: the Global Movement of Objects in Catholic Cultures,” will take place Friday, Oct. 20, and Saturday, Oct. 21 on campus in the Pere Marquette Gallery.
The Center for Research on Global Catholicism (CRGC) is a major humanities-based Big Idea funded by SLU’s Research Institute. The CRGC supports scholarship at the nexus of Catholicism and culture, providing robust programming that promotes interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and methodological innovation. It brings together three key components of SLU’s Jesuit history and mission: a legacy of global engagement, a commitment to rigorous academic inquiry, and a focus on social justice.
The focus of “Translations, Transgressions, and Transformations” is on the cultural mobility of Catholicism through the physical movement of objects—that is, how Catholicism moves, or is carried, across space and time by things like refined artworks, textiles, books, and mundane, everyday items. Material objects have long been at the center of encounters between Catholicism and local cultures as media of exchange that sometimes work to transfigure both Catholicism and culture in surprising and unpredictable ways.
“This conference has been in the works for a good year,” said Mary Dunn, Ph.D., Director of the CRGC. “For this first CRGC conference we knew we wanted to tackle an issue in the field of global Catholic studies in a robustly interdisciplinary way.”
The October conference brings together a diverse roster of scholars whose research engages topics like the global life of Francis Xavier’s rosary, Catholic identity and archival records in Senegambia, and the importation of the Chinese phoenix motif in textiles and paintings in the Catholic Middle Ages.
“Through this first biennial conference, the CRGC intends to use the examination of material culture and its movement as an example of its research aims to investigate the ways and means by which Catholicism migrated across time and space to become a global religion, entangled with people, places, and things around them,” said Cathleen A. Fleck, Ph.D., Executive Board member and Associate Professor of Art History.
“Translations, Transgressions, and Transformations” is open to the public.