This is one of a series of posts featuring Fellows from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation network.

The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for Ph. D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. The 2016 class of Fellows includes Caroline Garriott, a doctoral candidate in history at Duke University. Ms. Garriott is exploring the power of images in her dissertation:

Since I was raised in a modestly decorated Protestant Church, I’ve always been fascinated by the sensory wealth of Catholic liturgy and emotive power of images of saints. As an historian of colonial Latin America, I seek to understand how local populations in Brazil and Peru not only experienced the rituals of Roman Catholicism, but also modified them by crafting their own devotional narratives. For example, in 1651 an Angolan slave painted an image of Christ’s crucifixion on an adobe wall on the outskirts of Lima, which, surviving an earthquake, became venerated by Afro-descended populations and Spanish elites as the “Lord of Miracles,” and is today a global symbol of Peruvian Catholicism. My dissertation examines locally produced images such as the Lord of Miracles as cultural agents that, while embedded within a symbolic tug-of-war between the Catholic Church and popular devotion, might reflect or transgress Iberian religious hierarchies which discriminated on the basis of purity-of-blood.

Ms. Garriott’s dissertation title is Coloring the Sacred: Art and Devotion in Colonial Peru and Brazil. For more information on the 2016 Newcombe Fellows and to see a list of their dissertation titles, click here.

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