I am currently at work on a book manuscript, Promiscuous Grace: Rethinking Religion and Beauty with St. Mary of Egypt, that studies the immensely popular story of Mary of Egypt’s conversion from promiscuous twelve-year old to venerable anchorite, mediated by her interaction with an image of the Virgin Mary.
In a second project I study the politics of proximity present in the figure of the vecino, which designated in early modern Spain both neighbor and citizen.
Research Interests:
- questions of how violence has been (and still is) aestheticized and how violence can function as a communicative vehicle in different contexts.
Research Interests:
- relationship of beauty and holiness religion; secularization and modernity; theoretical approaches to religion and the arts, especially inter-media relations, practices of adaptation and translation, history and theory of iconoclasm and iconophilia; conversion narratives