Biography
Rachael Johnson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship studying themes of embodiment, immanence, and materialism in religious discourse of the 18th- and 19th-century transatlantic. She received her Ph.D. in early modern European and Latin American history from the University of Virginia where she specialized in the theology and sociocultural history of embodiment and affect in early modern Spanish Catholicism. She received support for work as a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellow and a Dumas Malone Dissertation Fellow and is working on a monograph exploring the contestations between Enlightenment and Baroque Catholicism over the nature of embodiment in devotional practice in the eighteenth-century Iberian world.
Publications
2021 Embodiment and Affect in Devotional Conflicts of the Spanish Atlantic (work in progress)
2021 “‘The Burning Charity of Our Ancestors’: Social Imaginaries and Confraternal Reform in Eighteenth-century Spanish Catholicism” (expected Fall 2023, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies)
2015 “Sor Maria Gertrudis and Her Cross: The Burden of Doubt in the Poetry of an Eighteenth-century Nun,” Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment 38:1 (2015), 83-102.
2015 “‘Equal Portions of Heavenly Fire’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Sexless Soul,” Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, Vol. 5 (2015), 55-96.