Lecture by Michelle Molina, Associate Professor, Religious Studies/History/Gender Studies, Northwestern University 

Thursday, Jan 6, 2022 | 7:00 p.m.

The past provides a playground of images, texts, and ideas that can both inform and trouble contemporary storytelling about mental health and mental illness.  This lecture will people your mind with images and ideas from the religious history of possession in the western world to show how its questions about the permeability of bodies and selves were key to the emergence of the medicalized sense of “self” we have today.  We will look at images from the past, but also film clips (the melancholy Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, or the spider god in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly) to think about how “religion” on screen points toward the problem of selves that are largely formed by others, sometimes other-worldly “others.” Despite our contemporary discourse that emphasizes “bounded” selves, we have to ask, are the boundaries of “self” firm for anyone?

More about Professor Molina at https://history.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/affiliated-faculty/j-michelle-molina.html.