Meet the Professor: Elizabeth Castelli
Meet Professor Elizabeth Castelli in the Department of Religion and the director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women!
What is the most interesting aspect of teaching at Barnard?
Barnard students are dazzling: smart, challenging, engaged, questioning, and creative. I teach a range of courses from first-year seminar through advanced research seminars in the Religion department, and in all these contexts—whether they are engaged in close reading, archival research, or participant-observation field work—the Barnard students I encounter are passionate about critical inquiry, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply interested in the world around them and concerned about its uncertain future.
Could you speak about current/recent research that you’re excited about?
My long-term ongoing project concerns the shifting terrain of the practice of confession—a sacramental practice that has waned and even withered in importance in its traditional institutional location (the Catholic church) but has flourished in many other cultural domains like installation and performance art, memoir, and even reality TV. Moreover, confession maintains a critical, if contested, central place in the legal system, the political domain, and the ethical imaginary. I am interested in the vexed nature of many confessions (false, coerced, self-serving confessions) and in confession’s cultural persistence even as it rarely produces the resolution it promises.
Why did you decide to teach at a historically women's college?
Teaching at a women’s college was not an explicit career goal of mine, but I have always been deeply committed to both liberal arts education and feminist scholarship and activism. So, in many respects, having the opportunity to teach at Barnard is an ideal combination of these commitments. In addition, in recent years, I have also served as the Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the oldest center of its kind in the United States—another terrific venue to bring scholarly inquiry into conversation with intersectional, social justice feminist activism.
What are your favorite classes you currently teach/have taught at Barnard?
That question is like asking, “Which of your children is your favorite?”! I love them all! Among them, however, I’d single out my course, “Millennium: Apocalypse and Utopia,” which travels from ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature through to contemporary Afrofuturism by way of medieval millennialism, European colonial fantasies, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American utopian communalism. In the fall, I plan to teach an advanced seminar on gender and sexuality in late ancient Christianity, which historicizes ideas about gender and its malleability and ancient theories of embodiment while also exploring the lives and histories of early Christian women who cultivated epistemic authority and spiritual virtuosity—generally, outside of conventional domestic frameworks. And I am very lucky from time to time to get to teach a first-year seminar on my current research—confession.
-Interview by Emily Ndiokho