Prof. Clarissa Chenovick Awarded NEH Fellowship

Congratulations to Prof. Clarissa Chenovick!

Chenovick has been awarded a prestigious NEH Fellowship for 2024-25. During her fellowship year, Chenovick will research and write towards her new book project, The Erotics of Blood Piety in Early Modern England.

The abstract for The Erotics of Blood Piety in Early Modern England:

This book project offers a new perspective on the relationships between sexuality and religion in the context of seventeenth-century English devotional poetry. Drawing on recent work in queer and asexuality studies as well as philosophical writings on the phenomenology of touch, it argues that both Catholic and Protestant poets in seventeenth-century England used images and tropes from the popular late medieval genre of “blood piety” –which imagines touching, kissing, entering, and experiencing ecstatic union with Christ’s wounds – to develop a devotional erotics that is highly embodied but not reducible to sexual desire or experience. Examining new archival evidence and overlooked connections between Robert Southwell, William Alabaster, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, and Aemilia Lanyer, The Erotics of Blood Piety revises critical assumptions about the differences between Catholic and Protestant poetics and provides a new theoretical approach to the erotics of devotion.

Prof. Chenovick also received an additional fellowship for the same project, a Huntington Exchange Fellowship jointly offered by the Huntington Library and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It provides assistance with airfare and room and board for one month of research in Cambridge, UK.

Congratulations!

 

 

 

photo by josemdelaa via Pixabay; licensed for use under Creative Commons 0/Public Domain Declaration (CC0 / public domain declaration).