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Research Interests
My central research focus is the religious
architecture of American universities in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. I am concerned with how
universities either maintained or discarded a
religious architectural image at the moment when they were
crafting modern identities. My work is rooted in that of
George M. Marsden at the University of Notre Dame, though I am looking at material
culture of the campus to capture a sense of how religion in the
American university was transformed.
Published in the Summer/Autumn 2009
issue of Winterthur Portfolio is my most recent article, "Reassessing Yale's Cathedral Orgy: The Ecclesiastical
Metaphor and the Sterling Memorial Library" (Winterthur
Portfolio
43, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2009): 159-184). I argue that
by appropriating religious imagery, the neo-Gothic Sterling
Memorial Library at Yale attempted to craft a new role for
religion in the modern Yale, but that the varying reception of
such imagery demonstrates religion's ambiguous position in the
modern American university.
I currently have
under review a journal article exploring the
University of Notre Dame's Hesburgh Library and its Word of
Life mural, better known as Touchdown Jesus. In this
paper I argue that while in the popular imagination the library
and its mural have more to do with the sacralization of Notre
Dame football, the intention of this 1964 building was to craft
a very modern image of Notre Dame while still retaining revealed
knowledge as the center and source of all knowledge.
Research for this article was generously supported by a 2009 Villanova
University VERITAS Faculty Research Grant.
I have also explored the Modernist
architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's chapel at I.I.T. and
Eero Saarinen's chapel at M.I.T. in
"Educating the Moral Scientist: The Chapels at I.I.T. and M.I.T.,"
ARRIS: The Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of
Architectural Historians 18 (2007): 1-14. My major project is a book
manuscript currently titled, White Elephants On Campus:
Religious Architecture in the Modern American University.
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