Author: Monica L. Mercado

Writing Women into the Catholic Summer School of America

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I’ve long been fascinated by the Catholic Summer School of America, the “Catholic Chautauqua” founded in the 1890s on the eastern shores of Lake Champlain just outside of Plattsburgh, New York. Thanks to a treasure trove of photographs made newly available by the Clinton County Historical Association archives in the early 2010s, and funding from Colgate University’s Upstate Institute just before the pandemic, my work on white women and the labor of leisure has finally made its way to print this month in Religion and American Culture (https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.8). Here’s a peek:

Fig. 1 Celebrating Feast of the Assumption (1910), courtesy Clinton County Historical Association, Image Number 95.033.0084b [link].

Latina/o/x Girlhoods

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Collection of the author.

As part of the ongoing Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibition “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” I joined a team of scholars writing on Latina/o/x experiences.

Read more about the project here, and visit my contribution, “Picturing Catholic Girlhood” online at Smithsonian Magazine, in English and Spanish:

“Pretty, pious, prayerful–the photographs that I study offer a glimpse into expectations for faithful girls, and prompt us to ask what young women may have thought about these moments of religious formation…”  

Teaching Sex and Sexualities in U.S. History

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This semester at Colgate, I’ve revised my upper-level History course, HIST 304 | Sex and Sexualities in U.S. History. In a few weeks, I’ll be chairing an excellent panel of scholars on a research panel on Sex and Religion, sponsored by S-USIH, the Society of US Intellectual History. The panel will take place on Zoom March 1 at 7pm eastern [you can register in advance, here]. Continue reading “Teaching Sex and Sexualities in U.S. History” →

The Convent Academy

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Loretto Academy postcard (1920), collection of the author.

Over at American Religion I wrote about my book; about driving to convents in rural Kentucky back when we could still travel; about a place I just can’t get out of my head. That place–the Loretto Community in Nerinx, KY–is just one of a handful of convent properties I’ve traveled to in the past year. Read more here:

To trace the stories of Catholic academy girls in nineteenth-century America—girls whose white skin and class privilege, I argue, made them symbols of both U.S. Catholic aspirations and anti-Catholic nightmares—I started making convent road trips. Even repurposed convent academies are often remarkably maintained, and I am drawn to their parlors, porches, hallways, and anterooms…

Loretto Academy (Nerinx, KY)

Women and Gender in American Catholicism

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This year, I’m teaching one course at Harvard Divinity School while finishing my book manuscript, and it’s the course I’ve always wanted to teach: Women and Gender in American Catholicism. Check out the syllabus online and let me know what you would add — I had to cut so much good, new, work in this thriving subfield off of the official reading list, but I hope my students will make a dent with their writing projects!

Museums and the Politics of Women’s History

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The Politics of Women's History in Collections 14.3 (Summer 2018).It’s June 4th, 2019 — 100 years to the day that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

I woke to find the #19that100 hashtag firing up on Twitter, with historians and GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) highlighting the anniversary and histories of voting rights in the context of the suffrage movement. Of course, it took more than a year for the Amendment’s ratification, so look out for much more suffrage history to come in 2020. Continue reading “Museums and the Politics of Women’s History” →