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Association News

ACHA Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, January 4–6, 2023

The American Catholic Historical Association held its 103rd annual meeting from January 4–6, 2023, in Philadelphia. The program committee consisted of Catherine Osborne, chair; Thomas Rzeznik, chair for the 2024 annual meeting (San Francisco); and Monica Mercado, chair for the 2025 Annual Meeting (New York). In total, 136 people registered for the conference, and there were many additional guests from the American Historical Association (AHA) and the American Society for Church History (ASCH).

The program featured ninety-seven speakers organized into thirty-three daytime panels, with one additional off-site evening panel sponsored jointly with the ASCH. While the program consisted primarily of traditional panels (three speakers presenting individual research) several roundtables were also well received. Topics of particular interest—judging both by numbers of submissions and by panel attendance—included the histories of laywomen; the body; sexuality; race and racism; anti-Catholicism; the material culture of Catholics; and the material culture of scholarly inquiry in both formal and informal archives. The majority of papers focused on United States or modern European topics, but Latin America was well represented and several pre-modern panels were developed from individual paper submissions. Brenna Moore’s presidential address “Rethinking Catholic Intellectual History” and a subsequent roundtable discussion “Why Catholic History? Why Now?” sparked lively discussion.

The academic part of the program concluded on Saturday evening at 5:00 PM, after which many members made their way to Old St. Mary’s Church for the annual ACHA Mass in remembrance of deceased members; Father Richard Gribble, C.S.C. presided. Following the liturgy, a social was hosted by the American Catholic Historical Society at their townhouse across the street from the church, where participants were able to preview the Society’s new exhibit “That 70s Catholicism.”

At the Presidential Luncheon on January 6, Executive Secretary Dr. Charles Strauss announced the establishment of the Association’s newest prize: The Robert F. Trisco and Nelson H. Minnich Prize for Editing a Work in Catholic Church History. As the announcement explained,

Edited works are frequently excluded from book prize competition. Yet the work of editing a book deserves recognition. Editors make others look good from behind the scenes: correcting errors (factual, grammatical, spelling, etc.), calling on authors to provide context and clarifications, putting their work into a proper and attractive format. Editors of documents need to be able to decipher difficult handwritings, be experts in languages (grammar, spelling, etc.), knowledgeable about the historical context in which the document was created, able to identify persons and events mentioned, have good judgment regarding preferred readings, etc. It is often meticulous work that goes unappreciated by the casual reader. The prize will give proper recognition to high quality editing.

The winner(s) of the prize may be an editor(s) of a published book or editor(s) for at least five continuous years of a periodical devoted to the history of Catholicism.

The luncheon program also included the announcement of this year’s recipients of the ACHA prizes, awards, and grants:

A. The Msgr. John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award is given annually to a graduate student in the final stage of a degree program who has demonstrated excellence in their dissertation research and writing to date. This year’s Ellis Award committee consisted of James P. McCartin (Fordham University), Mary Dunn (Saint Louis University), and Jennifer Scheper Hughes (University of California, Riverside). This year’s winner is Richard T. Yoder of Pennsylvania State University for “Unorthodox Flesh: Gender, Religious Convulsions, and Charismatic Knowledge in Early Modern France.” The citation read:

Jansenism and its enduring influence in the history of modern Catholicism has been the subject of many outstanding scholarly studies. But Richard T. Yoder’s dissertation on a French Catholic sect called the convulsionnaires promises to shed new light on Jansenism’s enduring significance, not only through the approaches of religious and gender history, but also of intellectual history and disability studies. Yoder’s research focuses on how, during the long eighteenth century, convulsion-naires’ experience of bodily convulsions and their practice of rites of sacred violence (including stabbing, searing, burning...