Call for Papers Session Overview
Day 1: October 20, 2023
Session 1: Biographies of Catholic Objects
This session showcases scholarship devoted to biographies of discrete objects in relation to the broader context of global Catholicism. We welcome papers that consider not only the provenance of a given object but also the ways in which the object moves across time, space, and culture and in relation to social, political, and economic contexts. To what extent and in what ways do objects change over time, place, and culture? What do object biographies illuminate (or obscure? Or distort?) about the relationship between people and things? What do object biographies reveal or conceal, in particular, about the dynamics of global Catholicism?
Respondent: Eugenio Menegon
Respondent: Eugenio Menegon
Session 2: Global Economies of Exchange
This session explores the dynamics and dimensions of practices of material exchange in the context of global Catholicism. We welcome papers that consider concrete practices of gift-giving and habits of valuation (including currency exchange, financial networks, and banking systems) as well as abstract concepts of worth and worthlessness, profit and loss, cost and benefit across time, space, and cultures. What kinds of items were exchanged as Catholicism migrated around the globe, between whom, and why? What do practices and ideas of exchange disclose about competing regimes of value? How did the exchange of material objects transform those objects–and the people or institutions involved? What is the relationship between the circulation of material objects and the broader spiritual economy of global Catholicism?
Respondent: Valentina Napolitano
Respondent: Valentina Napolitano
Session 3: Catholic Objects and their Memories, Hauntings, and Afterlives
This session interrogates the roles of objects in creating and holding the memories of a culture, its identity, and its relation to Catholicism. We welcome papers that consider the ways in which objects preserve cultural memory, contest power relations, undermine hierarchies, obfuscate meanings, or reveal representations to audiences distant in space and time. How do objects carry histories of global Catholicism? Do objects have agency? That is, are objects mere intermediaries that transmit without transforming cultural memories and identities? Or are they mediators that make a material difference to those memories and identities, shaping and shifting that which they purport to merely transmit? How do objects themselves change over time and space in relation to global Catholicism? Respondent: TBA
Day 2: October 21, 2023
Session 1: Catholic Material Culture and the Archive
This session investigates the archive itself as a material object that begs analysis. We welcome papers that interrogate the archive, loosely understood (inclusive of physical archival repositories, collections of canonical texts or artifacts, extant historical records, cultural memory, and more) as a concept in conversation with global Catholicism. In what ways do archives, however understood, determine what we can see–and what we can’t–about the dynamics of Catholicism’s worldwide diffusion? How do the organization, editing, and accessibility of the archive shape histories of global Catholicism? How do archives work to perpetuate some narratives and marginalize others? How do archives define, distort, conceal, enable, reveal, denigrate, elucidate and elucidate global Catholic identities?
Respondent: Markus Friedrich , published in 2013 the Birth of the Archive
Respondent: Markus Friedrich , published in 2013 the Birth of the Archive
Session 2: Catholic Objects and the Sacred
This session probes the relationship between material culture and the sacred, interrogating the line between immanence and transcendence, matter and spirit, this world and the next within the context of global Catholicism. We welcome papers that consider the role of material objects in engendering spiritual experiences, supporting religious practices, and stimulating theological ideas, inter alia. In what ways have Catholic objects facilitated or frustrated access to the sacred? What are the conditions under which objects serve as a conduit to the sacred? How does the migration of Catholic objects across the globe affect the relationship between material cultural and the sacred? What difference does place make? Power? Politics? Culture?
Respondent: Kristen Norget
Respondent: Kristen Norget