Robert Orsi

Robert Orsi, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America. Ph.D. Yale University. His research draws on both archival sources and ethnographic fieldwork and has focused on practices of Catholic devotionalism, specifically relationships between humans and the saints; religion in the industrial and post-industrial city; religion and immigration and migration; religion and gender; and religious responses to suffering and pain, including healing idioms. He is also interested in the critical review and development of theories and methods in the study of religion. His published works include:Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (1996); The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (1985). He is currently working on two related projects. One explores the way contemporary American Catholics remember the last 50 years, the memorial tropes they employ to represent and understand the tremendous changes of their lifetimes, and in particular the way they talk about their childhoods in the church. The other is a social and cultural history of growing up Catholic in the United States in the twentieth century, which raises questions about children's distinctive religious experiences and about what it means to become persons within specific worlds of religious practice and imagination.

Contact information:
- Harvard Divinity School
- Committee on the Study of Religion