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.
Education
2019 Ph.D. History, University of Virginia: fields in Iberian World 1450-1820;
Early Modern Europe and the World; Transnational Gender History
2015 M.A. History, University of Virginia
2011 B.A. in History, minor in Philosophy, Brigham Young University
Publications
2024 “Burning Charity” and Love for One’s Neighbor: Reformed Social Imaginaries of Charity and the Common Good in Eighteenth-century Spain and New Spain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 57, Number 2, Winter 2024, pp. 193-214.
2023 “Profane Bodies: The Shifting Conceptions of the Sacred and the Profane in the Spanish Atlantic Enlightenment,” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies: Vol. 48 : Iss. 1, Article 3, pp. 76-100.
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.
Work in Progress: Embodiment and Affect in Devotional Conflicts of the Spanish Atlantic (book proposal provisionally accepted, revisions underway)