This research program explores the ideas, practices, and experiences of beliefs around the world, from the post-Classical era until 1800, as well as their legacies, reception, and afterlives today.
This research program explores the ideas, practices, and experiences of beliefs around the world, from the post-Classical era until 1800, as well as their legacies, reception, and afterlives today.
Our team of scholars are experts in the fields of religion, theology, history, literature, medieval and early modern, women and gender, environmental, and reception studies, in a wide range of geographies and world cultures.
Michael Barbezat is a historian of medieval European religious, intellectual, and cultural history. His work has explored premodern ideas regarding sexuality and gender, the relationship between the body and the spirit, and the afterlife. His current research explores receptions and adaptations of the European Middle Ages within queer communities during the twentieth century. He is particularly interested in the ways that twentieth-century queer activists have turned to accounts of the past as tools for self-fashioning while creating new identities and queer lifestyles.
Sarah A. Bendall is a Senior Lecturer at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australia Catholic University. She is a gender and material culture historian who examines the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods between 1500 and 1800. Her first book, Shaping Femininity, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021 and awarded highly commended in the Society for Renaissance Studies UK biannual book prize (2022). She is co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Making Historical Dress Network and is writing her second book, The Women who Clothed the Stuart Queens (contracted to Bloomsbury). Her current research examines the contribution of protestant refugees such as the Huguenots to the fashion trades in seventeenth century London. Additionally, her work is also interested in how beliefs about the natural world influenced the use of natural resources in consumer goods.
Susan Broomhall is Professor of Early Modern Studies in IRCI, and leads the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of, most recently, Elite Women and the Italian Wars, 1494-1559, with Carolyn James (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Evangelizing Korean Women and Gender in the Early Modern World: The Power of Body and Text (ARC Humanities Press, 2023) and Encounter, Transformation and Agency in a Connected World: Narratives of Korean Women, 1550-1700 (Routledge, 2023). Her research explores beliefs across the early modern world, including Christian ideas were transmitted by organisations such as the Dutch East India Company and the Society of Jesus, and as Buddhist, shamanistic and other religious and moral codes were lived within societies across Europe and Asia. Current projects explore women's activities and the role of gender ideologies in shaping experiences and interactions with the Dutch East India Company; women's activities, including their spiritual practices and connections to religious culture, at the Joseon Korean court; and experiences of early modern French Catholic and Huguenot welfare support.
Michael Champion studies early asceticism and its reception, how religious beliefs and practices helped to reshape cultures of education, and how ancient and medieval ideas of emotion were taken up in different contexts, including to shape ethical norms of justice and equity.
Clare Davidson is a historian and literary scholar of late medieval and early modern England whose interdisciplinary work focuses on love, law, and medievalism. Her first book Love in Late Medieval England is contracted with Manchester University Press. In this work, she argues that fourteenth-century vernacular writings position love as a spiritual and aesthetic phenomenon as well as an emotion: essentially, she shows that loue was an experience of faith, craft, and feeling. Clare's continuing research in European cultural history of emotions and gender shows how this contingent concept of love-intimately associated with sexuality-was politicised in later periods. Interest in historical understandings of personhood also shapes her approach to social order, gendered political ideology, and theories of the body and corporation in early modern England. Clare's research in periodisation and medievalism has led to the development of new work on Australian historical jurisprudence. This project analyses various ways that beliefs about premodern history continue to influence Australian legal decisions.
Kristie Patricia Flannery is a historian of the global Spanish empire. Her published work, including her book Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World, examines Catholicism and colonialism in the Philippines and Mexico in the long eighteenth-century. She graduated with PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and held a Killiam postdoctoral fellowship at UBC before joining ACU's Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.
Sarah Gador-Whyte is a research fellow in Early Christian Studies in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. As a literary and cultural historian of late antiquity, Sarah has worked on emotions history, liturgical literature and the interplay of rhetoric and theology in liturgical hymns, late-antique historiography, the cultural and religious night in late antiquity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Sarah's research focuses on reception of early Christian and classical beliefs and texts in late antiquity and the early (primarily Eastern) medieval period. One of her relevant projects is a reception history of John the Baptist in late-antique liturgy and worship.
Peter Howard is past Director of the IRCI and an honorary professor at ACU and also in the School of Divinity, the University of St Andrews. His research and publications have centred on theology, preaching, and visual and material culture in Renaissance Italy. He is particularly interested in lay theological literacy, cognition and the construction of theology, and its implications for local beliefs, social experience, and culture. His current projects include 'Experiencing Religion in Renaissance Florence: Theologies of the Piazza' and 'The Sistine Chapel in the Fifteenth Century and the Visual Art of Preaching'.
Christopher Ocker is an Honorary Professor in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry and Interim Dean, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and John Dillenberger Professor of the History of Christianity in the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. He has published widely on medieval and early modern religious conflict, the Reformation and its medieval background, the mendicant orders, scholastic theology, and the interpretation of the bible. His current research is focused on friars and religious conflict in Europe's eastern border lands, and the light this sheds on cultural entanglements between Christendom, Jewish communities, and the Islamicate at the end of the Middle Ages. He is also Senior Editor of the series Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions and co-editor of the series Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte.
Natalie Tomas is an Honorary Fellow, who is interested in the interaction between Catholic preachers their sermons or treatises and their interactions and influence on their (large) female audience, particularly in times of crisis, upheaval or turmoil. Her focus is Renaissance early modern Florence. These writings often provide a window into contemporary understandings of gender, religiosity and expectations and understandings of women's use of power, influence and persuasion.
Linda Zampol D'Ortia is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU, and at the department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy). Her interests include the early modern Jesuit missions in Asia, Japanese premodern Christian (kirishitan) communities, history of emotions, gender history, history of Orientalism and encounters between Asia and Europe.
We encourage potential doctoral students seeking to work in all areas of premodern beliefs to contact potential supervisors directly.
Research students in the Premodern Beliefs program can participate in our monthly seminar and discussion group.
15-16 July 2024: Intercultural Encounters between Masculinities in the Pre-modern World: Emotions and Religion (Melbourne and Online) Convenors: Dr Linda Zampol d'Ortia and Prof Susan Broomhall
19-22 October 2024: 'Before Michelangelo: "Revisioning" Sixtus's Sistine Chapel as sensorium', ACU Rome Campus, with a public lecture (Peter Howard with Shannon Kuziow), 5 pm, 21 October 2024.
Recognizing Religions: The Cultural Dynamics of Religious Encounters and Interactions in Historical Perspective, a joint initiative between NYU Abu Dhabi Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World program, the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University (Professor Chris Ocker), and the European Qur'an: Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion project at the University of Copenhagen (EuQu). This partnership highlights recent and ongoing research in the interactions, habits, and concepts that facilitated 'recognition' of religion(s) and how these changed over time. 'Recognition' describes not merely the act of attentive observation and differentiation, but also implicit adaptation and appropriation, facilitated by real and imaginary encounters. We hope to contribute to knowledge of basic taxonomies and topographies of the contexts, forms, arenas, axes, and dimensions of recognition between cultural groups.
Flourishing in Early Christianity, an internationally collaborative project of the Biblical and Early Christian Studies Program in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (2022-2027). with Professor Michael Champion and Dr Sarah Gador-Whyte.
A History of Early Modern Natural Resource Management, an ARC Discovery Project (2021-24), led by Professor Susan Broomhall, with Dr Clare Davidson, A/Prof Darius von Güttner Sporzyński. Considers, among other aspects, the role of the supernatural in environmental management of the premodern period.
The Experiences and Voices of Japanese Women in seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company Batavia, funded by Japan Past & Present, with Professor Susan Broomhall, Dr Jessica O'Leary and Dr Ming Gao. Explores the histories of exiled Christian women from Japan in seventeenth-century Batavia.
Mobilising Dutch East India Company Collections for New Global Audiences, an ARC Linkage Project (2023-26), with ACU researchers Professor Susan Broomhall, Dr Kristie Flannery, Dr Killian Quigley, and PhD students Dondy Ramos III, Michael Reidy and Sumera Saleem. Examines, among other aspects, the role of religion and faith practices in the Dutch East India Company.
Moved Apart: Communicating experiences of separation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a Swedish Research Council Research Environment Grant (2024-29), with Professor Susan Broomhall, and Professors Lisa Hellman and Svante Norrhem (Lund University), Professor James Daybell (Plymouth University). Explores experiences of separation across European and East Asian cultures, including spiritual and faith practices across the worlds of the living and dead.