The 17th Annual Rita Cassella Jones Lecture: “The Juncture of Worlds: Scholarship As a Way of Life, and Living As a Scholarly Practice”

Universities began in the Middle Ages as an extension of Catholic monasticism, an intellectual world separate from the practice of everyday life. In many ways, advanced scholarship retains something of its original monastic flavor. Academics are taught to keep a respectable distance from their subjects, to aim for objectivity, to cultivate detachment. But what are we missing when we constrain scholarship within these normative dimensions?

In dialogue with her most recent work on Catholic narratives of sickness and disability in early modern French North America, Mary Corey Dunn, Ph.D., University of St. Louis, articulates a vision for a more humane kind of scholarship beyond the ivory tower: one that sits at the juncture of the personal and the professional, lived experience and archival record, scholarly practice and everyday life.

This will be an in-person presentation streamed live and recorded. In-person attendance is restricted to vaccinated Fordham community members; registration is required for all attendees.