The Juncture of Worlds: Scholarship As a Way of Life and Living As a Scholarly Practice

Join us for the 17th annual Rita Cassella Jones Lecture on Women and Catholicism. The university began in the Middle Ages as an extension of Catholic monasticism, an intellectual world separate and apart 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? What else might we learn—about the past, about others, about even ourselves—if we let down our guard and sidle up close to and alongside our subjects of study?

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

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