Projects

This project researches how the Society of Jesus adapted to the new situation of the independent republic of Congo (Zaire) by analyzing Jesuit discourses (e.g. allocutions, homilies, internal debates, publications and arts) and practices (e.g. hierarchies, training, behaviors and experiences) between 1960 and 2000. It will work with archival materials (the Flemish and Walloon Belgian Jesuits at KADOC, the Jesuit Curia in Rome, the ...

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, a sizeable number of Adivasis (indigenous peoples) in Chotanagpur (conterminous with present-day Jharkhand) adopted Christianity. This occurred amidst an evangelising drive by competing missionary societies as also the disenfranchisement of Adivasi land and identity exacerbated by mechanisms of internal colonialism.

The introduction of the printing press and its attendant periodicals by the ...

This dissertation takes a fresh approach to the study of the exchange in scientific knowledge between Europe and continental East Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a particular interest in cartographic practice. The mapping of territories controlled by the Great Qing, initiated at the behest of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722) and executed by teams of surveyors consisting of Qing officials and ...

The genre of the spiritual madrigal reached a height of popularity in the final decades of the 16th century. With its combination of philosophical and spiritual poetry, and the music-expressive power of the secular madrigal, it flourished in Counter-Reformist contexts as a medium for introducing sacred elements into the daily life. The Fleming Philippe de Monte (1521-1603) was not only one of the most significant and ...

The Counter Reformation caused the most dramatic musical shift the Catholic Church had seen in centuries. One of the key actors in this change were the Jesuits. Their expansion resulted in the dissemination of new music across the globe, reaching China, the Philippines and Mexico. But despite substantive research on Jesuit music elsewhere, we know little about their musical legacy in the Low Countries. Understanding this facet of Jesuit music ...

From the end of the 16th century (Ming Dynasty, the Wanli Emperor) to the late 18th century (Qing Dynasty, the Qianlong Emperor), there was an approximately two-hundred-year prosperous China-Europe cultural communication. Such cultural exchange was partly characterized by the essential role of printing that produced a large number of translations of Western works into Chinese, mainly attributed to Jesuits, which were ...

My research proposal is to study the biblical work of three Spanish Jesuit exegetes who were crucial to the formation of biblical studies during the Golden Age of Catholic Biblical Scholarship (1550-1650): Juan Maldonado, Alphonso Salmeron, and Francisco Ribera. My project will be able to fill a void in modern scholarship, which I was already able to make a start with through my dissertation on 'Jesuit Biblical Scholarship after Trent: ...

This project is in line with a current trend of research aiming at a better understanding of the respublica litteraria and at a reconstruction of its networks. While recent research around this topic mainly focusses on intellectual laymen, we suggest to study the case of a Jesuit, the Frenchman Denis Petau (Dionysius Petavius S.J., 1583-1652). Far from the irenic position advocated by some great figures of ...