Meet the Faculty

Constance Furey

• Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

• Ph.D. at University of Chicago, 2000

Contact Information

Background

• Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award 2004, 2009
• College Arts and Humanities Institute Fellowship, 2009
• Harvard University Women's Studies in Religion Program, Research Associate, 2005-2006
• National Endowment for the Humanities Stipend, Summer 2002
• Indiana University Summer Faculty Fellowships

I study how religious ideas and practices influence how people live in the world and understand themselves in relation to others. My first book examined how scholarly Catholics throughout Europe were inspired by their spiritual ideals and intellectual work to create a distinctive religious community—a Religious Republic of Letters—as other groups were unleashing the religious revolution known as the Protestant Reformation. The book I’m currently writing focuses on Renaissance England and explores how devotional poetry became a venue that both male and female writers used to craft a sense of self and of community. In this, as in my other research projects, I am interested in thinking about how religiously-motivated ideals and assumptions should be understood in relation to a whole host of social developments, ranging from the advent of print and new kinds of literary authority to the celebration of friendship and changing roles for women. 

My interest in theory as well as historical analysis is reflected also in the courses I teach, which include not only surveys and thematic courses about Christianity, with a primary focus on the West, but also undergraduate and graduate courses on anthropological, sociological, and philosophical approaches to the study of religion.

Research Interests

• Christianity in Early Modern Europe
• Friendship and community formation
• Devotional poetry
• Gender and Religious Subjectivity

Courses Recently Taught

• Catholic Controversies: From Trent to the Present
• Interpretations of Religion
• Christianity 400–1500
• The Reformation: Body and Word

Publication Highlights

Books

Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge University Press, September 2005)

Articles

“Troubling Presence: Abundant History and Heterology: A Response to Robert Orsi’s ‘Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity’” HistoricallySpeaking (December 2008)

“Utopian History” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20.4 (2008), 385-398.

“The Selfe Undone: Individualism and Relationality in John Donne and Aemilia Lanyer” Harvard Theological Review, 99.4 (Fall 2006), 469-86.

“Utopia of Desire: Visions of the Ideal in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” The Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36.3 (Fall 2006), 561-584.