Meet the Faculty

Constance Furey

• Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• Associate Department Chair, 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 am a scholar of Renaissance and Reformation Christianity, interested especially in the emergence of new types of religious and intellectual communities and theoretical questions of relationality and intersubjectivity. I wrote on religious humanism in my first book, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2006), and have published several articles and essays on the intertwining of friendship and utopian thought in early modern England. My current book project focuses on how devotional poetry by both male and female writers in the English Renaissance re-imagined intimate relationships as sites of utopian longing and fulfillment.

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, changing conceptions of marriage and patronage, and shifting assumptions about gender.

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. I am also involved in developing a new Initiative for the Humanistic Study of Innovation, a project close to my heart not only because of my interest in utopia but also because of the pressing need to demonstrate the value of the humanities--including the study of cultural phenomena from distant times as well as places--to the ongoing project of creating a better world today.

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

"Intimate Virtue: Puritan Marriage and Devotional Poetry." Forthcoming from The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. (Spring, 2012).

"Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies," Journal of the American Academy of Religion. First published online (Nov. 17, 2011).

"The Religion of Literature," online forum of the Martin Marty Center, The University of Chicago. (June, 2010).

“Troubling Presence: Abundant History and Heterology: A Response to Robert Orsi’s ‘Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity’” Historically Speaking (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.

"Invective and Discernment in Luther, Erasmus, and More" Harvard Theological Review. (October 2005), 469-88.