History Department

Stephen Schloesser, SJ

associate professor

Stephen Schloesser

Telephone: (617) 552-2267

Email: stephen.schloesser@bc.edu

Website: https://share.bc.edu/10811

Education

Ph.D., Stanford University, 1999


Fields of Interest

Late Modern Europe; Religion; modernisms; music


Academic Profile

Professor Schloesser joined the faculty in the fall of 1999. He specializes in late modern French cultural history with a special interest in the intersections between Catholicism and various modernisms. In addition to both semesters of the Modern History core, he teaches "20th-century Catholic Imaginations," "Celluloid Salvation," and "Modernity Confronts Catholicism, 1789-1989." He is also an adjunct professor at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge.


Representative Publications

  • "The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions," Cross Currents (forthcoming).
  • "Against Forgetting: Memory, History, Vatican II," in Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, ed. David Schultenover (2007).
  • "Against Forgetting: Memory, History, Vatican II," Theological Studies (2006). 
  • "Not behind but within": Sacramentum et Res, Renascence (2005).
  • Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933 (2005)
    Recipient of the American Catholic Historical Association's John Gilmary Shea Prize for the most original and distinguished contribution to knowledge of the Catholic Church. Reviews in The New Republic, The Catholic Register (Toronto), and Theological Studies.
  • "'What of that curious craving?': Catholicism, Conversion and Inversion au temps du Boeuf sur le Toit," Historical Reflections / Reflexions Historiques (2004)
  • "From 'Spiritual Naturalism' to 'Psychical Naturalism': Catholic Decadence, Lutheran Munch, Madone Mysterique in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol, and Expression, ed. Jeffrey Howe (2001)
  • "Maritain on Music: His Debt to Cocteau" in Beauty, Art, and the Polis, ed. Alice Ramos (2000)
  • "'Only a God Can Save Us': Disabling the Rational Subject in Heidegger's Reactionary Modernism" The Heythrop Journal (1995)
  • "'A King is Held Captive in Her Tresses': The Liberating Deconstruction of the Search for Wisdom from Proverbs through Ecclesiastes" Church Divinity (1990)
  • "The Method of Abstraction: A Musical Analysis" Process Studies (1986)