CRGC Fellows

Cloe Cavero is a specialist in early modern art and visual culture, focusing on Spain, Italy and Latin America. After receiving her Ph.D., from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and a lecturer at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research has appeared in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Print Quarterly, and the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, among others. Her current book project traces the post-Tridentine revival of the images and cults of child martyrs in the early modern Iberian world. By examining complex artworks by painters such as Francisco de Zurbarán and Cristóbal de Villalpando alongside humble representations in far-flung local shrines, and the circulation of prints between Manila, Madrid and Mexico, this project unveils the centrality and creativity of Hispanic visual culture in the age of colonial expansion and Catholic evangelization.

Matthew Elia is assistant professor of theology, race and environment at Saint Louis University. His first book, "The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery," is forthcoming with Yale University Press. He earned his Ph.D., in the Graduate Program of Religion at Duke University, supported by an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. He is working on a second book on climate justice, race and migration, tentatively titled "We Are Each Other's Harvest: Solidarity at the End of the World."

Gabrielle Guillerm is an associate professor of American history at Sorbonne Université in Paris. She specializes in the intersection of Catholicism and white supremacy in the United States. Her current book project examines how French missionaries helped entrench white supremacy in the American West in the decades following the American and French revolutions. From September 2022 to June 2024 she worked as the research coordinator for truth and healing at Mahpíya Lùta (Red Cloud School). Led by the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, this Truth and Healing project seeks to confront the history of this former Jesuit boarding school for Lakota children.

Michael Iyanaga is the John & Audrey Leslie Associate Professor of Music and Latin American Studies at William & Mary. Iyanaga's historical and ethnographic work is largely concerned with studying Catholic saint devotional practices in Brazil and the Atlantic world from the 15th to the 21st centuries.

Stephanie Kirk is director of the Center for the Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also holds affiliate appointments in Religious Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A specialist in gender and Catholicism in colonial Latin America, she is the author of two books, two edited volumes, and numerous articles and essays. She is working on her third monograph, "Bodies as Books: Early Modern Jesuit Writings on Global Martyrdom." Additionally, she is engaged in a translation and scholarly edition of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's 17th-century chronicle of convent life in Mexico City, "Western Paradise."

Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a Ph.D., student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. Carlos is broadly interested in how the category of religion has been defined and redefined across different historical and social contexts. His dissertation explores how federal immigration agencies in the United States have engaged the category of religion and its actors as a means to control the flow of immigrants near the U.S.-Mexico border. In the 1980s, federal immigration agencies criminalized people of faith who were seeking to provide refuge to Central American immigrants who crossed the Southern border irregularly. Today, federal agencies work closely and intentionally with faith-based migrant shelters near the border. Carlos' dissertation explores this shift, as well as the relationship between church, state, and migration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Thomas Morin is a sixth-year Ph.D., candidate in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. Tom's interests include Italy and the Crusades from the 12th through the 14th centuries. His research utilizes chronicles and archival sources to analyze social, political, and cultural interactions in the context of crusading and maritime theft in the Mediterranean. The title of his dissertation is "Blood on the Page: Genoa, the Latin East, and Competing Narrative Traditions in the Medieval Mediterranean," 1099-1409. Before his time at SLU, Tom achieved the rank of captain in the U.S. Army.

Darby Ratliff is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University and holds a Pre-Doctoral Public Humanities Fellowship in partnership with the Missouri Historical Society. Darby's dissertation focuses on the intersecting histories of Catholic education in the 19th century, looking specifically at schools for white and indigenous children along the upper Mississippi region.

Miguel A. Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. Miguel is a scholar of the African diaspora in the Iberian world. His research has focused on Black Catholic brotherhoods or confraternities and Afro-creole festive practices in colonial Latin America, especially Mexico and Brazil. He is author of Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and a co-editor of Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). He is working on his second book, Architects of Their World: The Artistic and Ritualistic Spaces of Afro-Brazilian Brotherhoods (under contract with Cambridge University Press). His research has appeared in various academic journals, including Slavery and Abolition, Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas, the Journal of Festive Studies, and Latin American Research Review.

Stephanie Wong is an assistant professor at Villanova University in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, where she teaches Catholic theology and East Asian traditions. Her scholarly work focuses on Chinese Catholicism and is both interreligious and transnational in focus. She is interested in how Chinese Catholics have reckoned intellectually and spiritually with Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist and Communist visions in their local milieu, analyzing how Catholic theology has developed in East Asia through a contextual and comparative lens. Wong is also interested in the geopolitical dynamics of lived Catholicism, especially as Chinese Catholic communities span different languages, geographies, and generations across and beyond the sinosphere. Before starting at Villanova, Stephanie taught at Valparaiso University and studied at Georgetown University (Ph.D.), Yale University (m.Div.) and Washington University in St. Louis (B.A.). She has been involved in a range of social scientific, ecclesial, theological, and community-building efforts, such as participating in a Yale-CUHK study of religious communities in Hong Kong, the Vatican's network of Women Building a Culture of Encounter interreligious dialogue group, co-leading the American Academy of Religion's Chinese Christianities Group and the Catholic Theological Society of America's comparative Theology Group, and serving on the board of Interfaith Philadelphia.