Meet the Fellows

Andrew Barrette received his Ph.D. in 2018 from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he finished his dissertation, The Origin of the Question: The Structure and Emergence of Questioning in Edmund Husserl’s Work, under the direction of Anthony Steinbock. He is in the process of preparing a manuscript on similar themes in Husserl’s method which means to ground his future work in phenomenological ethics. As a Lonergan Fellow, he is also working on Bernard Lonergan and his relation to phenomenology.

At the Institute, Barrette is researching Jesuits in Leuven at the turn to the 20th century, focusing especially on Joseph Maréchal and Pierre Scheuer. Along with editing some of their work, he aims to show the enduring significance of how they engaged, understood, and influenced philosophical and theological traditions. To this end, Barrette highlights how their method emphasizes a charitable approach to interpretation. From this, he aims to prepare further research into the missionary and ecumenical work of the students of this school.

Claudio Ferlan is a full-time researcher at the Italian-German Historical Institute (Bruno Kessler Foundation) in Trento, Italy. Having received degrees in law and history (with a doctoral degree in Early Modern History from the University of Trieste). Ferlan is the author, among others, of I gesuiti (2015; translated into Portoguese in 2018), a concise general history of the Society, and Sbornie sacre, sbornie profane (2018), a history of drunkenness between the old and new worlds the early modern age. His food-history blog is https://claudiofoodhistory.wordpress.com/.  

At the Institute, Ferlan is working on a research project about food habits (ecclesiastical fasts, table behaviors, beverages, and drunkenness) as essential features of the negotiation between individuals and social models in the Jesuit missionary culture between the 16th and 19th centuries. In particular, Ferlan is investigating the discourse on Jesuit food culture as developed by the missionaries after the restoration of the Society of Jesus, using the case studies from Maryland, New Mexico, and Oregon. These cases represent a connected historical perspective, exemplified by the experiences of European Jesuits. The goal is of Ferlan’s project is to connect the histories of the pre-suppressed Society of Jesus with the “New” Society as well as those of Europe and the Americas through the lens of food culture.

Hilmar Pabel is a Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University (1992). The religious and intellectual culture of the Renaissance and Reformation constitutes his main field of research. Pabel is a specialist on Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), having published several articles and two books on the famous Renaissance humanist: Conversing with God: Prayer in Erasmus’ Pastoral Writings (1997) and Herculean Labours: Erasmus and the Editing of St. Jerome’s Letters in the Renaissance (2008).  While researching Erasmus’ edition of Jerome, he encountered Peter Canisius (1521-1597) as the first Jesuit patrologist. 

At the Institute, Pabel will continue work on his book on the literary career of Canisius.  He interprets the prolific Jesuit—and the first Jesuit in print—as a confessionalized humanist, or a writer who put a humanist predilection for ancient (classical, biblical, and patristic) texts and a classicizing eloquence in the service of asserting a confrontational Catholic identity against Protestants. The focus of Pabel’s research in the fall semester of 2019 will be Canisius’ voluminous polemical treatises on St. John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary, available in a 1583 edition at Boston College’s Burns Library.

Marco Rochini received his Ph.D. in History of Christianity from the Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy, in 2015. He collaborates with the Department of Science Religious of the Catholic University of Sacred Heart of Milan. He is a specialist in the history of the Roman church and Christianity, paying particular attention to the history of the Society of Jesus, the history of the religious missions, and the Jansenist and reformation currents in the Catholic world during the eighteenth century. 

At the Institute, Rochini will complete two projects over the academic year. He is working on the Digital Indipetae Database, a platform consisting of the letters written by Jesuits to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus requesting a missionary assignment overseas. Rochini is also finishing a book project on the indipetae written during the “New” Society of Jesus. The book will be a companion to the Digital Indipetae Database, providing scholars with an interpretative tool with which to understand the relevance of the indipetae in their historical context.

Christoph Sander received his Ph.D. at Technical University of Berlin and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome) for Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions. His research deals with the conceptions of magnetism in the early modern period, with a current focus on diagrams. His second field of research is the history of early modern Jesuit philosophy, particularly the idea and practice of censorship in Jesuit colleges.

At the Institute, he will prepare an edition of a sixteenth-century Italian manuscript, which contains the first monographic treatise on magnetism and was written by the Jesuit, Leonardo Garzoni (1543-1592) around 1580. While a drafted version of the text has been edited in 2005 already, the planned edition will be based on a recently rediscovered manuscript held at Madrid, which can be seen as the final redaction of Garzoni’s study. His experimental approach to the subject precedes, and partly inspired, the more famous studies on magnetism by Giambattista della Porta and William Gilbert. An edition, accompanied by an English translation, will enable painting a more nuanced and complex picture of the scientific achievements of the early modern period, with a rather unknown Jesuit as one of its pioneers.

Emanuele Colombo (Ph.D., University of Milan and Padua)--an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Catholic Studies at DePaul University--used his fellowship at the Institute to begin work on a digital database of the indipetae, those letters written by Jesuits to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus to apply for the missions overseas.

Laura Madella (Ph.D., Università Roma Tre) came to the Institute while serving as a research assistant at Università degli Studi di Parma. She used her fellowship at the Institute to research the Jesuits' triennial catalogs, which recorded information about every Jesuit since the 16th century.

Aislinn Muller (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) wrote her doctoral dissertation on the papal excommunication and deposition of Queen Elizabeth I in 1570. While at the Institute, she wrote about the political and religious implications of Queen Elizabeth’s excommunication for the Jesuit missions and began a new project that examines the role of material culture in those missions to early modern England.

Elisa Frei (Ph.D., Università degli Studi di Udine) worked with Simon Ditchfield at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York before coming to the Institute. She used to her fellowship to develop doctoral dissertation into a monographic-length publication and to write several articles.

Peter Nguyen, S.J., (Ph.D., St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto) came to the Institute as an Assistant Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He used his fellowship to write a book on the writings and theology of Alfred Delp.

Francisco Malta Romeiras (Ph.D., Universidade de Lisboa) used his fellowship at the Institute to complete a book on Jesuit science and education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also wrote an essay on the history of the Society of Jesus in Portugal, from the sixteenth century to present times.

Barbara Ganson (Ph.D., University of Texas-Austin) came to the Institute as a Professor of History and Director of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She used her fellowship at the Institute to complete a new English translation and edited volume of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las provincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay y Tape (1639), now available at Jesuit Sources.

Cinthia Gannett (Ph.D., University of New Hampsire) came to the Institute as an Associate Professor of English and Director of Core Writing at Fairfield University. She used her fellowship to research on a historiography essay on Jesuit rhetoric.

Charles Keenan (Ph.D., Northwestern University) used his fellowship at the Institute to complete a translation and annotated edition of The Exercise of a Christian Life (Esercitio della vita christiana, 1557), a devotional treatise written by Gaspar Loarte, S.J., which is now available at Jesuit Sources. He also wrote a historiographical essay on Jesuit devotional literature, which is available at Jesuit Historiography Online.

Eugenio Menegon (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) came to the Institute as an Associate Professor of History at Boston University and having directed the university's Center for the Study of Asia. He used his fellowship to study the daily life and political networking of European residents (especially Jesuits of the French and Portuguese missions) at the Qing court in Beijing during the 17th-18th centuries. His personal website is available at: http://blogs.bu.edu/emenegon/

Jeffrey Muller (Ph.D., Yale University) came to the Institute as a Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. He used his fellowship to research the Jesuits' global strategy of accommodation and to write a historiographical essay on Jesuit visual culture, which is available at Jesuit Historiography Online.