NEWS | NOUVELLES

Recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Religion CIRG (Collaborative International Research Grant) for the project “Beyond Mother Goddesses: New Directions for International Scholarship on Motherhood in Religious Studies” along with Pascale Engelmajer, Giulia Pedrucci and Sucharita Sarkar.

Organisation du colloque « Maternités mystiques, spirituelles, ascétiques, monastiques : Explorations à l’intersection du religieux et du maternel » à la Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses de l’Université Laval, avec le soutien du Fonds Gérard-Dion. Série de conférences-midi avec neuf intervenant·e·s, le 10 janvier 2021 (soirée d’ouverture, en ligne), puis du 13 janvier au 10 mars 2021.

Organization of the workshop “Motherhood and Religion Workshop : A Comparative, Interdisciplinary, Matricentric, Feminist Approach” in the framework of the virtual AAR annual meetings of 2020, held online on November 29, 2020, with 2 keynote speakers and 30 attendees; in collaboration with Pascale Engelmajer.

Mothers, motherhood and mothering in religious traditions is another area of study that I developed during my postdoctoral research and continue exploring. I have published on the topic of pregnancy, prenatal and childbirth rituals that I have explored through a mostly anthropological approach. In the summer session of 2014, I have designed an undergraduate cross-cultural and comparative course on “Mothers, Motherhood and Mothering in Religious Traditions” taught at the University of Mississauga. I have redeveloped this course into a BA/MA level course, taught in French at the Université de Fribourg during the Fall semester of 2016. Most of my recent publications are on this same topic.

In line with my previous background, I have also examined contemporary Hindi literature and early-modern devotional Vaisnava poetry through the lenses of motherhood studies, focusing on the theme of “spiritual mothering” as well as on feminine and maternal figures of Krishna-bhakti such as Yashoda and Devaki. I have also coedited (with Giulia Pedrucci and Marianna Scapini) an interdisciplinary and trilingual volume on Motherhood(s) and Polytheisms, published in 2017, that explores maternal figures in a variety of traditions, beyond traditional figures of mother-goddesses.