Alain Thomasset, s.j.

Alain is a professor of moral Theology at Centre Sèvres-Facultés Jésuites de Paris. In recent years he has published, among others titles, "Paul Ricoeur, une poétique de la morale"(Peeters, 1996); "Interpréter et Agir. Jalons pour une éthique chrétienne,"(Cerf, 2011) "Quand la foi est sociale. Analyse de témoignages de chrétiens engagés."(coming soon).  During his stay at the Institute he will work on the biblical roots of Christian moral virtues, focusing in the role of imagination in Christian moral life and social ethics.

email: alain.thomasset@jesuites.com

Isabelle Duceux

Isabelle has been twice a Research fellow at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History  (University of San Francisco, 2009 and 2010). She has published several articles and a book ("La introducción del Aristotelismo en China a través del De anima, siglos XVI-XVII," Colegio de Mexico, 2009) studying the adaptation of Western philosophy and theology into Chinese language and thought in the early modern age. At the Institute she will further her investigation on those topics, focusing on Niccolò Longobardo S.J. and his search for spiritual substances in Chinese philosophy.

email: dumeiyi@hotmail.fr

Pamela Jones 

Pamela is Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  A specialist in Italian art of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she is particularly interested in art and religious culture. Her recent publications include Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Ashgate, 2008) and Federico Borromeo ‘Sacred Painting’ ‘Museum,’ (The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2010), for which she provided the introduction and notes and Kenneth S. Rothwell, Jr. translated the Latin texts. Her first association with Boston College was in 1999 when she was a co-curator, along with Franco Mormando, of the exhibition Saints & Sinners: Caravaggio & the Baroque Image at the McMullen Museum of Art.

Project Title: Teresa of Avila’s Beatification Apparato in S. Maria della Scala: Global Catholicism and Perceptions of Holiness in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome

My project concerns perceptions of Teresa of Avila’s holiness in papal Rome at the time of her beatification in 1614. For the celebration, an ephemeral decorative program was displayed in S. Maria della Scala, the mother church of the Italian branch of the Discalced Carmelite Order. This elaborate program represented a turning point in Roman ephemeral imagery. In addition, rather than focusing exclusively on Teresa’s contemplative life it presented her as a multifaceted holy woman, one of whose roles was the matriarch of a global Catholic missionary order.

Contac info:
pamela.jones@umb.edu

Daniele V. Filippi

Born in Milan (Italy) in 1975, Daniele V. Filippi studied Musicology in Cremona and in Heidelberg, and completed his PhD in 2004. His research interests focus on sacred and spiritual music between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has published books and articles on Palestrina, Victoria, de Monte, and G.F. Anerio.

Project Title: The Soundscape of Early Modern Catholicism

This project is the second phase of a research started at the University of Pavia (Italy) in 2010 under the title “A History of Sonic Experience in the Renaissance” (http://www.sonicexperience.org/). Its object is to investigate the sonic culture of early modern Catholicism, trying to answer questions like: How central was the experience of sound (or of its absence) in everyday Catholic life? What was the ideal Catholic soundscape like, according to ecclesiastical documents, preaching, spiritual literature, etc.? And how did this ideal soundscape interact with the sonic reality of the time? Focusing mainly on sixteenth-century Italy, and going beyond the boundaries of ‘liturgical music’, I will explore these problems both in a systematic way and through case studies.

Contact info:
dvfilippi@gmail.com
http://www.sonicexperience.org/