We invite you to join informal conversations with scholars working on the history, spirituality, and educational heritage of the Society of Jesus. Learn more about the Institute’s Jesuit Studies Café sessions here. Register for the Cafes offered each month in order to receive access to the Zoom link.
Spring 2026 Conversations
At Jesuit Studies Cafes in the spring of 2026, we will disscuss the history and culture of the Society of Jesus.
February 26, 2026
Ines G. Županov, French Centre for Scientific Research, France
Missionary Enchantment in South Asia, 16th–18th Centuries: Catholic Histories and Fictions
(Routledge 2025)
Max Weber’s classical notion of enchantment serves in this book to highlight the clash and rewiring of ethical and cosmological codes in European and Indian early modern cultural encounters from the 16th-century onward. Since Portuguese imperialism was unable to justify itself without invoking otherworldly intervention, Catholic missionaries provided the vocabulary and narrative of global salvation. Each chapter in this volume explores a range of enchantment techniques used by missionaries, encompassing historical prose, poetry, images, and translations, woven through with emotions and wrapped in illocutionary force. Catholic missionaries in India wrote from and about the soft belly of tropical colonialism with certainty about the triumph of Christianity. Understanding the subterranean bond between history and fiction is at the heart of this book.
March 26, 2026
Anthony Clark, Whitworth University, Washington
Staging China: Jesuit Theater and the End of an Empire (19th–20th Centuries)
(Brill 2025)
This book represents the first monograph study of Jesuit religious theater in China and its connections to the commemoration of the Society’s martyrs of the late Qing dynasty. It considers the Society’s efforts to rehabilitate the Western imagination of China and the Jesuit aim of stirring emotional responses to stage performances that inculcate Catholic and Western sensibilities. By connecting the religious underpinnings of the Spiritual Exercises to the sumptuous Baroque expressions of Jesuit drama performed on China’s stages, this important work explores an entirely new area of research that weaves together several modes of analysis – visual, cultural, and nationalistic.
April 23, 2026
Andrés I. Prieto, University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado
The Theologian and the Empire: A Biography of José de Acosta (1540–1600)
(Brill 2024)
Although Jesuit contributions to European expansion in the early modern period have attracted considerable scholarly interest, the legacy of José de Acosta (1540–1600) is still defined by his contributions to natural history. The Theologian and the Empire presents a new biography of Acosta, focused on his participation in colonial and imperial politics. The most important Jesuit active in the Americas in the sixteenth century, Acosta was fundamentally a political operator. His actions on both sides of the Atlantic informed both Peruvian colonial life and the Jesuit order at the dawn of the seventeenth century.
May 21, 2026
Cristiano Casalini, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Boston College,
Alessandro Corsi, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Boston College, &
Dave Thomas, Digital Libraries, Boston College
Tracking Communities: The Jesuit Catalogs Database
The Jesuit Catalogs Database (JCD) is the latest digital research resource developed by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies in collaboration with the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Boston College’s Digital Libraries, and Brotéria. This talk will introduce the database’s core functionalities, clarify the project’s collaborative model and avenues for participation, and survey the digitized materials already available to support ongoing and future research initiatives.