Sonia Velázquez, a scholar of religion, literature, theater, and visual art, focusing especially on early modern Spanish and French cultures, has been promoted to associate professor at Indiana University in the Department of Religious Studies. Her work brings fresh and exciting perspectives on some classical topics, including “beauty” and “holiness,” as spurs for thinking through human religious life. Velázquez has engaged theological ideas and texts very insightfully to generate new ways of conceiving of religious life from a scholarly point of view, which also speak to broad and foundational questions in the humanities about the purposes and power of different forms of artistic creation. Her recently published first book is entitled Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with St. Mary of Egypt.
The College of Arts