Rachael G. Johnson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, studying the historical and theological foundations of embodiment in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. 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 her 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
2021 Embodiment and Affect in Devotional Conflicts of the Spanish Atlantic (work in progress)
2021 “‘The Burning Charity of Our Ancestors’: Social Imaginaries and Confraternal Reform in Eighteenth-century Spanish Catholicism” (revise and resubmit, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies)
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.