Conferences offer a fantastic way to share your scholarship and to keep up-to-date with the work of others who share your interests.  There are two upcoming conferences sure to be of interest to followers of the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project.  Below is a description of each conference, the deadline for submitting a paper proposal, and the date of the conference.  Members of the Provenance Project team will be at both and look forward to seeing you there!

Second Annual Jesuit Research Student Symposium

The Jesuit Archives: Central United States, Saint Louis University College of Arts and Sciences, Saint Louis University Department of History, and Saint Louis University Libraries will host a joint research symposium 10-11 November 2015 to explore the history of Jesuits and race.

Undergraduate and Graduate students from all disciplines are warmly invited to submit a proposal for a twenty-minute presentation.

Proposal abstracts should be no more than 250 words, and are due to the selection committee by 3 August 2015. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. David P. Miros, Jesuit Archives, at dmiros@jesuits.org, or Dr. Silvana R. Siddali, History Department, at siddalis@slu.edu. More information, the symposium flyer, and abstract submission form are available here.

Encounters Between Jesuits and Protestants in the Americas

The 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (1517) and the shifting Christian landscape of the Americas today provide an opportunity to reflect on the historical relationship between Protestants and Jesuits in the Americas. This international conference at Boston College on June 14-18, 2017 is partnered with two other conferences—at the Ricci Institute in Macau (November 9-11, 2016) and at the Jesuit Historical Institute in Nairobi, Kenya (June 28–July 1, 2016)—in an effort to better understand the historical encounters between Jesuits and Protestants around the globe.

The Jesuits, one of the most influential missionary orders, have been at the center of a flourishing body of scholarly literature. The relationship between the Society of Jesus and Protestants in the Americas, however, has not been sufficiently studied. Did Jesuits and Protestants interact in the American setting, and how? Did the encounter with Protestantism and the Reformation affect the Jesuit approach to Native American peoples? In the Americas, the ambitious colonies of expansive European empires confronted each other through colliding religious visions, programs, and propaganda. The image of the Jesuit, so prominent in European confessional conflict, similarly inspired Catholics and provoked Protestants throughout the Americas. The patterns set by the Reformations have continued during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following the restoration of the Society of Jesus in the nineteenth century, its members participated in missionary and educational projects throughout North America and the heavily Protestant United States. In the late twentieth century, Evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries have led a sweeping Protestant revival throughout Catholic Latin America, changing a religious landscape that had endured for half a millennium. Supported by the monarchies of Spain and Portugal, the Jesuits were instrumental in bringing Catholicism, and with it, European art, sciences, and culture to the Americas. Protestant and Jesuit interactions in the Americas are part of a larger study of comparative European colonialism as Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English empires staked claims to the Americas within a one-hundred-year period. Europeans did not intend to separate Christianity from military might, political savviness, and economic necessity (or extravagance).

How did Calvinists, Jesuits, and Puritans approach the conversion of indigenous peoples? Did Protestant models of evangelization draw on Jesuit practices or vice versa? Do inter-religious relationships in the twenty-first century reflect the conflicts of the past 500 years? The questions to be asked of Jesuit and Protestant encounters in the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present are many; the answers, however, are few. To participate in this discussion, email a short (200-250 words) abstract of a proposed paper to the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies (iajs@bc.edu) before 31 May 2016, and if accepted, the full paper before 31 December 2016. Please indicate “2017 Symposium” in the subject line. The abstract and conference presentation should be in standard academic English. Selected papers will be published either in a dedicated volume or in the Journal of Jesuit Studies (Brill).  For more information, follow the link here.