Book Projects

Ongoing and Future Book Projects

The guiding thread throughout my current and future research is the importance of the particular, gendered body in the human spiritual, psychological, and somatic life. It is only through particular bodies that one may come to a coherent philosophy of love as the foundation of emotions and reason, a philosophy that requires not just “the” body, but my body, our bodies. I currently have two projects which I am currently pursuing.

Moving St. Monnica’s Bones

In Moving St. Monnica’s Bones, I will trace Monnica’s presence both in Augustine’s texts as well as in her “afterlife” as a saint in the context of North African Roman and Italian Roman religious life. I will explore the marital, maternal, and funerary practices of Late Antique Roman society in order to recuperate Monnica from the view that she was a shrill harpy who doggedly nagged her son as well as the view that she was a living saint. In my project, I seek to give a feminist analysis of the religious and historical tradition surrounding Monnica and what that says about the presence of women in early (and late) Christian life. I seek also to ground Augustine’s theology of love and embodiment in his relationship with and understanding of his mother.

Two major methodological lenses of this project are embodied emotion theory and extended mind theory. These two cognitive theories are being utilized by scholars such as Diana Stanciu at the University of Bucharest in order to better understand the material conditions and philosophical underpinnings of religious thinkers like Augustine. I seek to utilize these theories in order to explore the materiality of grief and funerary rites as well as marriage and concubinage in the fourth century. As the focus of this project is on Monnica’s corpse, I also seek to read the reception of Monnica through the eyes of her son as a feminist scholar of these cognitive theories. Through exploring the intensity of emotive feeling of son for mother and vice versa I hope to recuperate an account of Monnica that is bold and representative of her importance as an individual.

When Love was Desire: Reason, Emotions, and the Search for God and Soul:

In When Love was Desire: Reason, Emotions, and the Search for God and Soul, I seek to firmly place gendered desire as the foundation for emotion and cognition in Augustine’s thought. This project expands upon my doctoral work by exploring the history of emotions and passions of the Late Antique period by focusing on Augustine’s unwitting role in the bifurcation of love and reason. Some thinkers think of emotions as personal (something that occurs inside and then is expressed to others), and yet others think them social. My attention to emotion before the creation of the modern individuated subject challenges this common understanding by interpreting them as both.