Expertise

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
Past Affiliations

Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, Arts and Humanities Division, College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison (past)

Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington

Communities
Literature, Religious Studies
Degrees
PhD, Princeton University, Spanish Literature and Culture, 2012
MA, University of California Irvine, Spanish Literature, 1999
AB, Princeton University, Comparative Literature, 1997