research funding
Past Recipients
2025
Juan M. de Lara Vázquez, ph.d
Juan M. de Lara Vázquez is a fellow at the Department of History, Cultural Heritage, Education and Society at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome. He is a scholar of international relations between the Holy See, Italy and Spain in contemporary times. In July 2024, he received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Catania with a thesis on international relations between the Holy See and Spain between 1938 and 1953. He then went on to study migration from Europe to America after the end of World War II and the construction of neo-fascist networks between Italy and Spain starting in 1943.
PROJECT
“The reception of European exiles in the Diocese of St. Louis (1940-1946).“
- The objective of the present project is to investigate the role played by the Holy See in the management of post-World War II migration flows and the different categories helped at the expense of others. Starting from this distinction, a further objective will be to understand the motivations that led papal diplomacy to devote itself to the relief of populations that decided to move within Europe and to the Americas. To try to answer these questions, the funds of the Secretariat of State contain reports sent to the various nuncios with instructions to follow. We know that the nunciatures in Lisbon and Madrid were two of the main avenues for getting relief paperwork through, but those in Paris, Berlin, and the main European representations were also concerned with numerous refugee cases. As papal organizations were established and organized, the requests followed predetermined routes. On this point the funds of the Relief Commission and that of the Information Office, which in many cases are divided by nationality of the applicant, are interesting to see.
The records of the Archdiocesan Archives of Saint Louis, as well as those of the Archives of the Society of the Sacred Heart, will be crucial to better reconstruct the work of Catholic congregations and the U.S. Catholic Church during these years.
Amy E. Traver, Ph.D.
Dr. Amy E. Traver is a Professor of Sociology at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. She is also a graduate student in the Master of Library Science program, concentrating on archives, at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Amy is interested in intersections of identity, religion, and adoption in American life, as well as student success in community-college contexts. Her publications include articles in Teaching Sociology, Internet and Higher Education, Qualitative Inquiry, and Qualitative Sociology. She is the co-editor of a special issue on humanistic sociology for Teaching Sociology (with Shin and Bakalarz-Duverger, 2024) and the volumes: Humanistic Pedagogy Across the Disciplines (with Leshem for Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Poetry Across the Curriculum (with Jacob and Kincaid for Brill/Sense, 2018); and Service-Learning at the American Community College (with Perel Katz for Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Amy is also a 2019-2020 recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship.
PROJECT
“In/Formation: A Historical-Sociological Study of Catholic Women Religious’ Formation in Context and Consolidated Archives.“
- This project focuses on the organizational specifics of religious formation. While often framed as an individualized, graceful response to God’s call or an embrace of global religious virtues or pillars, it posits that religious formation processes are historically- and organizationally- (or provincially-) specific, even within the same charism. Through comparison of the formation processes of the Albany, Los Angeles, and St. Louis Provinces of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, as well as the Congregational Center and former Vice Province of Hawaii, this work stands to add to the sociological literature on the organizational structuring of religious identification. The project is also positioned as a methodological case study on the value of consolidated archives for historical sociologists, who frequently conduct comparative analyses.
The material, intellectual, and social supports provided by a CRGC Research Grant are instrumental to Amy’s travel to and use of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet Consolidated Archives in St. Louis.
Fr. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C.
Fr. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C. is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross.
Fr. Koeth earned a B.A. and M.Div. from Notre Dame and an M.A. from Catholic University of America before earning his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is an urban and religious historian whose research focuses on U.S. Catholic involvement in postwar metropolitan development, including urban renewal projects, public housing, and suburbanization. His first book, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America, was published in 2025 by the University of Chicago Press.
PROJECT
“Unless the Lord Builds the House: A Religious History of U.S. Public Housing.“
This project explores the crucial importance of American Catholics in the planning and building, inhabiting and abandoning, razing and reimagining of public and affordable housing projects from the New Deal to today. Beginning in the 1930s and 40s, the U.S. Catholic bishops were staunch advocates for public housing. In the 1950s and 60s, in cities across the country, parish priests and lay faithful lobbied for the building of public housing, and helped organize residents of public housing to form community, clean up properties, provide recreation for children, and press city and housing officials for improved living conditions. And since the 1970s and 80s, when cities began tearing down high-rise public housing projects, religious nonprofits have formed public-private partnerships to build affordable housing.
Employing the Archdiocesan Archives of St. Louis, as well as the archives of the Daughters of Charity, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, and St. Louis University, this project will investigate the priests, religious, seminarians, and lay faithful who were active in ministries serving the residents of inner-city public housing complexes like St. Louis’ infamous Pruitt-Igoe.
Alice Laburthe
Alice Laburthe is a PhD candidate in modern French and American history at Northwestern University. Her work explores the intersection of gender and settler colonialism.
PROJECT
“Nuns, Settler Colonialism, and the Education of Indigenous Women: A Comparative Study of Civilizing Missions in Nineteenth-Century North America and North Africa.”
- This project compares settler colonial governments’ and Native peoples’ responses to the Catholic schooling of Native and métis women in the 19th century U.S. Midwest and Algeria, and historicizes and interrogates the conflicts and debates over the status and role of Indigenous women. By doing so, this project seeks to demonstrate the contingencies of settler colonial trajectories, to differentiate between groups of colonizers with different “civilizing” ambitions, and to introduce an alternative narrative to the seemingly inevitable cultural elimination built into the “civilizing missions.”
Thanks to the CRGC grant, Alice will visit the archives of the Society of the Sacred Heart to gather information on the establishment and running of the sisters’ Kansas mission schools for the Potawatomi. Alice will also research missionaries’ correspondence at the archives of the Archdiocese of St. Louis to survey the sisters’ relations with the communities among whom they labored.
2024
Robert Bagley
Robert Bagley is a third-year doctoral student in American history at Saint Louis University.
He graduated from Northwestern University in 1998 with a BA in History. After working in the private sector for nearly two decades, he returned to academia in 2017. He earned his MA in History from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville in 2021.
PROJECT
“St. Mary’s Infirmary and the Sin of Segregation”
- This project explores the intersection of medical civil rights, the Catholic Church, and segregation in St. Louis during the interwar years (1918-1939). Robert’s dissertation research journey has been enriched by the invaluable resources of the Saint Louis University Archives and the St. Louis Archdioceses Archives. He is also looking forward to delving into the rich collections of the Jesuit Archives and the Archives of the Sisters of St. Mary’s, all located in St. Louis.
We would also like to share that, over the course of his St. Louis research, Robert presented his work on St. Mary’s infirmary, the Jesuits, and the Sisters of Saint Mary to a public audience at the Missouri History Museum. Afterwards, the editor of their magazine, Gateway, solicited an article for publication based on Robert’s findings. Most of the relevant material for this article came from the Saint Louis University archives and the SSM archives at Westport Plaza in St. Louis. Look out for Robert’s forthcoming Gateway piece, “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis.”
Christopher Spencer Gurley Jr
Christopher Spencer Gurley Jr is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where he specializes in American religious history.
Chris received his undergraduate degree in Political Science from Tennessee State University, before subsequently earning graduate degrees in theological studies and religious history from Vanderbilt Divinity School and Yale Divinity School, respectively.
His research explores the intersection of African American history and U.S. Catholicism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
PROJECT
“The Cost of Progress: Catholic Progressives and the Politics of Blackness Over the Twentieth Century”
- This project investigates the production of new notions of Roman Catholic religious experience (through frames of “class,” colorism, politics, and belonging) from Black Southerners’ engagement with Catholic orthodoxy alongside the introduction of diasporic practices into the faith. Specifically, it examines the lives of Catholic bishops recognized for advocating for Black civil rights and integration, including Cardinal Joseph Ritter and Bishop Joseph Durick. This research seeks to answer two questions: What are the political and theological uses, meanings, and understandings of the categories of ‘progressive’ and ‘Catholic’ in the United States over the long twentieth century? How is the history and social legacy of “progressive” Catholicism better contextualized when considering the voices of African Americans—Catholics and non-Catholics alike?
Chris’ research utilized archival materials from the Archdiocese of Saint Louis, the Diocese of Nashville, and the Joseph’s Society of the Sacred Heart.
Sr. Doretta J. D'Albero, ASCJ
Sr. Doretta D’Albero, ASCJ, is a Religious of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Hamden, CT.
She earned an MA in Biology from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and a Certificate in Spirituality from the Angelicum (Rome). After 20 years of teaching and 8 years of legal immigration work, she serves her Congregation as a historian and translator and is currently compiling a comprehensive history of the US Province of the Apostles.
PROJECT
“How the charism of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus has effected a spread of the Catholic faith among Italian immigrants in St. Louis and immigrants of today”
This project will take a critical look at how the lessons learned by the Sisters in their early work with Italian immigrants downtown and on the Hill have translated into their present ministries which serve a much wider range of nationalities. By creating educational components, it is hoped that young generations of Sisters and students will honor their ancestors’ ideals and sacrifices by living justly and compassionately in today’s multicultural society.
Sr. Doretta will utilize resources from the archives of the Archdiocese and of SLU, the Oral History project at UMSL, the Missouri Historical Society, The Hill Neighborhood Center, personal interviews, and the Congregation’s own internal files housed at Cor Jesu Academy (Affton) and Sacred Heart Villa (on the Hill).
Sophie Cooper, PhD
Dr. Sophie Cooper is Senior Lecturer and Subject Lead in Liberal Arts at Queen’s University Belfast.
Sophie is a social historian of Irish migration, with particular focus on gender, religion, and the built environment during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sophie’s monograph, Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, c.1830-1922 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), was awarded the ACIS Lawrence J. McCaffrey Prize for Books on Irish America in 2023. Her recent publications include articles on women religious, material culture, and gendered minorities in the city.
PROJECT
“Irish Women, Religion, and Public Belonging in the City”
Public space has traditionally been designed for a masculine presence with women who demanded space historically branded ‘public women’. Irish Women, Religion, and Public Belonging in the City complicates this discussion of the urban space as an outcome of male agency by investigating the role of religious and lay women in shaping the built and material environments that they inhabited.
The CRGC Research Grant funds Sophie’s travel to the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondelet Consolidated Archives in St Louis to research the role of the CSJs in the development of Chicago and the provision of social care, both as and for fellow Irish immigrants, and for wider Chicago society.
The CSJs were an integral part of Chicago’s Irish community, despite originally being a French order. This research will contribute to the project’s core question of whether there were particularly ‘Irish’ tactics that women across Ireland and its urban diaspora deployed to demand public space within male-dominated institutional buildings and streetscapes. The archives of St Joseph’s Orphanage and Home for the Friendless will therefore be used to track how engagement with ‘Irishness’ shifted over time. Combining theoretical frameworks of power and space with built environment and gender history, this research builds upon existing literature to present a new perspective on urban history and the role of women in prioritizing individual and communal resources to demand a public presence for themselves, their religion, and their ethnic community.
Élodie Giraudier, PhD
Dr. Élodie Giraudier is a Lecturer of History at Franklin College, Indiana. She received her Ph.D. in History from Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Focused on U.S.-Chilean relationships, her research seeks to elucidate the role of religion (Catholicism) during the Cold War.
Élodie is the author of one manuscript under contract on the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) in Chile (1957-2010) and thirteen articles on Chilean Catholics and politics and PDC’s international relations during the Cold War. Formerly, she was Visiting Scholar at Harvard History Department and Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She received the Marjorie Kovler Fellowship from the Kennedy Library Foundation in December 2019 and the Theodore M. Hesburgh Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center (Notre Dame University) in 2020. Élodie is fluent in English, French, and Spanish.
PROJECT
“The Influence of the U.S. Catholic World on 1960s Chile”
The Chilean Christian Democracy is supposed to be primarily influenced by European Catholics. This project aims to challenge that historiography and highlight how the U.S. Catholic networks supported Chilean clergymen and Christian Democrats in the 1960s. This entails the documentation of how U.S. bishops, priests, orders, organizations and Catholic political leaders interacted with the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC).
Élodie will visit the archives of the Archdiocese, Saint Louis University, and the Jesuit Archives & Research Center to search for unique information on religious actors and institutions sharing different political views on Chile. By integrating the archives from institutions in St. Louis into this project’s research plan, she hopes to articulate U.S. Catholics’ different perspectives on Chile. These differences could be explained by the local environment, the presence or absence of contacts with the Kennedy administration, liberalism and conservatism.
She expects to document how U.S. Catholic networks (less connected to Washington circles) interacted with their Chilean counterparts and the PDC during its rise. These findings would show the contribution of U.S. Catholicism to the Cold War throughout its connections with Latin American developing countries.