Prof Emily Michelson

Prof Emily Michelson

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2881
Email
edm21@st-andrews.ac.uk
Location
St Katharine's Lodge
Office hours
By appointment

 

Biography

I am a cultural historian of religion, with a special interest in Italy 1400-1700, religious diversity and encounter, mobility and walking. Before coming to St Andrews in 2009, I taught for three years at the University of Utah, a beautiful place. I earned my undergraduate degree in History and Literature from Harvard University, and my PhD in History and Renaissance Studies from Yale in 2006.

Teaching

I enjoy teaching on all of my research topics topics as well as on the intellectual, social and artistic traditions of Renaissance Italy.  I welcome inquiries from students interested all aspects in the Renaissance, the Reformation in Catholic regions, or the social and cultural history of Italy. I currently teach on the first-year survey MO1007, and 'History as a Discipline' (HI2001. At honours level I offer modules on Renaissance Venice, Early Modern Rome, Renaissance Italy, Saints and Sanctity, Walking Early Modern Europe, and  Blood, Glory, Judgment: Early Modern Catholicism.

Research areas

I am a cultural and religious historian of early modern Italy. Most of my research addresses two fundamental questions: 

  1. How did early modern people balance their public acts of religion with their private beliefs and other priorities? 
  2. How did close contact affect the way different religious groups interacted and imagined each other? 

 These questions have inspired all of my research, in various ways. My first book (The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy, Harvard UP 2013), applied these questions to Catholic preachers in Italy as they reacted to the many competing pressures of the Protestant Reformation. My second book (funded by a British Academy mid-career grant and an AHRC early-career fellowship), Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance, reconstructs the spectacle of forced conversion sermons to Jews in Rome, held publicly ever week from the 16th through the 18th centuries. The book argues that the spectacle of these sermons became the city’s most powerful platform for promoting both conversion and Catholicism in a changing world, and, more broadly, that these rhetorical and ceremonial uses of Jews reveal Catholic concerns about globalization, Islam, and Protestantism. 

I have also co-edited a volume of essays in honor of Prof. Carlos Eire, and another on the varieties of religious minorities in early modern Rome, a book which reveals a surprising level of religious diversity and interaction at the heart of the Eternal City. I'm currently co-editing a volume (with Jan Machielsen and Katrina Olds) that seeks to redefine sanctity in the early modern world.

I am increasingly interested in how space, mobility, and especially the act of walking on foot might change the way we think about interfaith encounters and religious minorities. I am currently Co-Investigator on the ItalianROSE project, which seeks to uncover hidden diversities in the Italian Renaissance by examining objects and spaces of encounter. On this project I work with Professor Mary Laven at Cambridge and a research team at both universities.

I am also a proud co-editor (with Prof. Harald Braun, Liverpool) of the Routledge interdisciplinary book series Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge.

 I'm very happy to hear from scholars and potential students on any aspect of early modern Italian religious culture or related topics.

Selected publications

 

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