We regularly spotlight members who are making waves in their departments, institutions, communities, or within AAR. If you would like to submit a member to be interviewed, please email communications@aarweb.org with the member’s name and a brief message on why they are a good candidate. Read more of our Member Spotlight interviews.
About Mary
Mary Dunn (she/her/hers) is a professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. Dunn is the author of several books, including From Mother to Son: the Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin (Oxford 2015), The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition (Fordham 2016), Intimacies: Intersubjectivity and the Formation of the Religious Subject in the Modern Christian West (Indiana 2020), and most recently, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Narratives of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton 2022), which won AAR’s 2023 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies. She is currently at work on a new book project focusing on the history of Quebec’s nineteenth-century foundlings and the Augustinian nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu who cared for them. Dunn directs the Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University. She is also a 2024 recipient of AAR’s Individual Research Grants.
What is your area of expertise or field of study?
I am a historian of early modern Catholicism with disciplinary training in the field of religious studies. My work, which has ranged broadly across the subjects of women religious, spirituality and mysticism, Jesuit missions, Indigenous relations, motherhood, sanctity, sickness, disability, possession, martyrdom, and more, focuses on Catholicism in French North America between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Why did you get involved with AAR and how is your work aligned?
There’s no professional organization quite like the AAR that provides such robust support—conferences, funding, resources, networks—for scholars of religion and scholarship on religion in all its disciplinary diversity. I got involved in the AAR because, years ago in graduate school, Bob Orsi told me I should. I have stayed involved because there’s no better way to keep a finger on the pulse of the study of religion writ large.
What is your favorite AAR member benefit, and how has it helped your career? This might include access to our grants, award programs, and/or various research tools; opportunities to promote your scholarship through our official channels; networking and mentoring; career training through Beyond the Professoriate; and discounts on travel, transportation, and office supplies.
I have benefitted directly from the various ways in which the AAR recognizes published scholarship and supports scholarship-in-progress. In 2023, I won the AAR Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies for Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See. The email with that news absolutely made my year and provided a boost of publicity for my book. This summer, thanks to funding provided by an AAR Individual Research Grant, I travelled to Quebec to do research in the archives of the monastère des Augustines in connection with my new book project on abandoned children and the Catholic nuns who provided for their care in the nineteenth century.
What is one piece of advice you’d give to a first-time Annual Meeting attendee?
Don’t let the awkwardness of your first Annual Meeting turn you off. Keep going every year. Attend panels, ask questions, meet old classmates, and professors for coffee. It will get fun over time and soon you’ll discover you actually look forward to going. Also, consider registering for a pre-conference workshop. These can be great ways to meet like-minded scholars and fantastic opportunities to continue your education!
What book is on your nightstand that you’re reading or intend to read in the future?
Ooh! I love this question. Alice Munro’s Runaway is on my nightstand and I cannot wait to crack it open. But first, I have to finish the glittering jewel that is Claire Keegan’s Foster.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I love working in the fiber arts—sewing, embroidery, knitting. I’m also a distance runner and am looking forward to my first ultra marathon at the end of September. Hope I make it to the Annual Meeting.