Sessions
Smith-Petit Lecture: Dr. Robert Orsi [Online]
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Sat
Smith-Petit Lecture: Dr. Robert Orsi
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Sat
Robert Orsi is Grace Craddock Nagle Chair of Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also Professor of Religious Studies, History, and American Studies. Professor Orsi studies modern and contemporary religion, with a special focus on Catholic practices and ideas, from both historical and ethnographic perspectives. He also researches and writes on theory and method in the study of religion. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has also been a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2016-2017, Orsi was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His books include, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1959; Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes; and Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Among his edited volumes are Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (1999) and The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (2012). His most recent book is History and Presence, was published in 2016 under the Belknap Imprint of Harvard University Press. He is currently at work on a book called Give Us Boys about the formation of young men at a Jesuit high school in New York City in 1967-1971 as an episode in the broader history of modern Catholic sexuality, social class, and urbanism. This will be published by Columbia University Press. In academic year 2020-2021, Orsi was a fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, where he helped create the Gender, Sex and Power project. A native of New York City, Orsi is married to the theologian and Luther and Schleiermacher scholar, Christine Helmer, and has two sons, Clarence and Anthony, and two dogs, Rocco and Gemma.