Center for Research on Global Catholicism

The Center for Research on Global Catholicism (CRGC) at Saint Louis University supports scholarship at the nexus of Catholicism and culture, providing robust programming that promotes interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and methodological innovation.

In this video, three members of the CRGC leadership team discuss the center, its mission, and why SLU is an ideal place to do this research.

CRGC Fellows

The Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University is pleased to announce the launch of its inaugural Seminar Fellowship Program for 2024-2025 on the theme "New Directions in Research on Global Catholicism: Mobilities, Migrations, Circulations."

Meet the CRGC Fellows

Postdoctoral Research Fellows

The Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University supports two postdoctoral research fellows. Postdoctoral research fellows pursue their own research projects and assist with CRGC programming for two-year terms.

Anna Katharina Rudolph

Anna Katharina Rudolph (Ph.D., Medieval History, University of California, Santa Barbara) is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University. Her research is driven by questions of how the sacred intersects with the political to define women's roles over time and across space. She is currently spearheading the St. Louis Catholic Archives Collective, an initiative partnering the CRGC with archivists at multiple independent local women's archives to increase the visibility and accessibility of their collections. As a historian of medieval women's history, her research interests include the intersection of gender and sanctity, the cult of the saints, queenship, and monasticism. Rudolph's current book project, "Dynamics of Women's Sanctity from Medieval to Modernity, Rewriting History, Hagiography, and the Myth of the French Nation," uses the global "afterlife" of the Frankish queen-saint Radegund of Poitiers (520-587), to investigate the complex relationship between hagiography, gender and the construction of national identities.

Our Mission

Our mission is to make Saint Louis University an internationally-recognized hub for research on global Catholicism. The Center for Research on Global Catholicism supports scholarship on the ways and means by which Catholicism migrated across time and space to become a global religion, entangled with imperial ambitions, in excess of official intentions, mobilized by material objects, affective relationships, politics, theologies, epidemics and more.

The objectives of the Center for Research on Global Catholicism include:

Capitalizing on scholarly expertise at SLU and in St. Louis to advance knowledge and understanding of global Catholicism
Facilitating connections between local archives and research scholars
Supporting scholars working in the field of global Catholicism by providing resources, community, and opportunities for collaboration

The Center for Research on Global Catholicism is a Big Idea project sponsored by the Research Growth Fund at SLU. The first Big Idea grounded in the Humanities, the CRGC brings together three key components of SLU’s Jesuit history and mission: a legacy of global engagement, a commitment to rigorous academic inquiry and a focus on social justice.

Support Us

Giving to the CRGC supports our lecture and book symposium series, conferences, seminar fellows program and more.