History Department

Stephen Schloesser, SJ

associate professor

Stephen Schloesser

Telephone: (617) 552-2267

Email: stephen.schloesser@bc.edu

Website: http://www2.bc.edu/~schloess

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)
  • "'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)