H-Catholic

"David Jones: Christian modernist?" Oxford (UK), 10-13 September 2014.

 ‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘making it new’ through formal experimentation, and a widespread drive towards a regenerated New Era of human history. For many modernists, Christianity stood for a bygone era to be overcome; the reactionary, dead hand of the past.

Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’.

I am seeking to form a session on American Catholic women for the American Catholic Historical Association Annual Meeting, which takes place on January 2-5, 2015 in New York City. 

American Catholic women are largely absent from the narrative of women's history in the United States.  Kathleen Sprows Cummings has argued that exploring the lives of previously-unknown Catholic women is important, but historians must also examine the significance of those lives, and consider how they add to our overall knowledge of the past.  This panel will seek to add to our knowledge of American Catholic women by exploring the lives and work of women but also in using religious faith as lens through which to view women’s lives.