A Transmutation of St. Anthony's Relic-Reliquaries and the Troy Hill Community
Relics of Faith is a public lecture that will be delivered by Andréa Hanna, WHC Graduate Student Assistant in Public History and presented in St. Anthony's Chapel in the local Troy Hill community.
Lecture Abstract:
The history of America is bound up with immigration. As immigration brought people to America’s shores, it also brought material artifacts important to their cultural heritage. This research project puts specific artifacts, the many thousands of Catholic relics in St Anthony’s chapel, into dialogue with Troy Hill residents as they share their memories and relationships with these transregional objects. Explicitly, this talk explores the role(s) these relic-reliquaries have played in re-constructing the identity of Troy Hill’s Germanic, Catholic, immigrant community over time.
About the Speaker:
Andrea Hanna is a graduate MA student in the department of Communication and Rhetoric and Graduate Student Assstant in Public History for the World History Center for Summer 2018. She read a BA in Theology at Durham University in the UK. As a result, her research interests focus primarily on the rhetoric of religion, particularly the limitations of the linguistic economy and how religion strives to find the “perfect language.” She is interested in applying psychoanalytical methods to better understand religious concepts, particularly the tendency or religions to use visual rhetorical methods to convey complex beliefs when the linguistic economy fails.
The event is sponsored by the World History Center. For more information, email whc@pitt.edu.
August 27th at 7:00pm