Description:

J. Michelle Molina is the John and Rosemary Croghan Chair, Associate Professor in Catholic Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern. She studies the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. She explores Jesuit spirituality in an effort to understand how individuals — both elite and commoner — approached and experienced religious transformation. In particular, she has been interested in examining the impact of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises — a meditative retreat geared toward self-reform — on early modern global expansion. Molina is the author of To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767 (University of California Press, 2013). The book examines the impact that this Jesuit program of radical self-reflexivity had on the formation of early modern selves in Europe and New Spain. She offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of a “modern self” by demonstrating how the struggle to forge and overcome selves was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary expansion.